‘House’ (1977)

House (1977)

There are a lot of films called “House.” I cannot imagine what is going to challenge the experience of seeing the 1977 film House, a Japanese movie that defies conventional description on many levels. It is easily one of the strangest films I have ever seen. It is a horror movie, yet it is a film that is so cheery and puzzling that it might cause “H.R. Pufnstuff” creators Sid and Marty Krofft to scratch their heads. The plot is a simple haunted house premise. Oshare (Kimiko Ikegami) is angry with her father and changes her vacation plans so as to get away from him and visit an estranged aunt who has a house in the country. She brings her girlfriends along for the ride; each has a descriptive nickname. Prof (Ai Matsubara) is smart and calculating. Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo) is good at Kung Fu. As the girls begin to disappear, a Nancy Drew sort of investigation ensues.

The film tells the story of a haunting through a hodgepodge of strange special effects, cutesy animation, and unorthodox editing. There is a constant musical score that alternates between tedious and evocative. Schizophrenic excursions into side stories are jarring, no doubt due to director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s extended work in commercials. House is his feature-length film debut, and it is difficult to determine if the film is ingeniously meticulous or magically incompetent. I don’t know if it is possible to film a bad dream, but the anarchic use of transitional techniques and the bizarre attitudes of the victims lend the film a nightmarish quality. Not the sort of nightmares where a man with claws comes blazing out of a wall with children’s heads hanging off his belt, but the sort of nightmares where a child’s head hovers out of a well giggling and you engage the head in conversation as if nothing much is wrong. If you are like me, there are films you find yourself thinking about the next day. I don’t know who to recommend this movie to, but I’m definitely going to see it again.

‘Body Rock’ (1984)

Body Rock (1984)

It makes sense that Body Rock was made the same year as Breakin’ (1984). All the good dancers must have been making Breakin’ when Body Rock was being filmed. Where as the cast of Breakin’ was largely a group of unknowns who knew how to dance, part of Body Rock’s budget went to pay Lorenzo Lamas. Chilly (Lamas) is a cut-rate rapper/break-dancer who runs a crew called the “Body Rock Crew.” The BRC are, according to Chilly, ready for their big break despite the fact that only a few of them dance competently. But the big break comes when an uptown businessmen wants Chilly to perform in his club. He goes on to achieve great fame in the club circuit despite the fact that he has no discernable talent. He is able to sleep at night under the notion that he is eventually going to ease everyone from the BRC into his club act so they can all “make it” like he has. But after a few leather jackets and sexual encounters with strangers hot for his fame, Chilly quickly forgets his roots. The BRC must struggle without him.

First of all, isn’t this the plot of Breakin’? Krush Groove? Both of these movies came out the same year as Body Rock. The differentiator is that there were talented people in those movies. Lorenzo Lamas is hilarious as he lumbers through the movie like a rapper in a fast food training video. The best parts of the movie for me were the ludicrous stage productions put together by the club choreographers after he “makes it.” One where the lights go out and these neon skeletons dance around him incompetently is worth sitting through the whole movie to see.

Breakin’ was essentially a pretty awful movie, but the dancing saves it. Here, the dancing saves the movie as well; only it is all the terrible moves making the movie worthwhile. The best dancer in the whole thing is a young man named Magick (La Ron A. Smith). There is an awesome montage where Magick teaches Chilly to dance. Of course, when it’s over, Chilly can’t dance any better than when he started.

Another bizarro-world parallel between Body Rock and Krush Groove/Breakin’ is that Chilly forgets his friends and must eventually choose to if or not to redeem himself. I don’t want to give the story away, but I will tell you that if he does happen to come crawling back to the BRC, it is because he has no other choice. In Krush Groove, for instance, Joseph has to make a moral choice regarding whether or not to realize who he was. In Body Rock, the moral is that talentless schlubs who fall into high paying jobs should not burn bridges.

‘Frankenstein’s Daughter’ (1958)

Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958)

Frankenstein’s Daughter is one of those great, nonsensical science fiction movies from the late 50s where the science and motivation of the characters doesn’t make much sense. Dr. Frankenstein’s grandson (which I believe isn’t possible as the story takes place in 1958) wants to continue his family’s eccentric work. But this particular Dr. Frankenstein, hiding in America under the moniker Oliver Frank (Donald Murphy), isn’t as much an insane genius as he is just a jerk. He is taking advantage of poor Professor Carter Morton (Felix Locher) by using his lab, screwing up his research, and drugging his daughter. It sort of serves Morton right for not asking for references. Frank cannot even produce a fake I.D. that says who he is. For a Frankenstein, he is a pretty lackluster mastermind.

When Frank drugs Morton’s daughter Trudy (Sandra Knight), she becomes this sort of Frankenstein’s monster/werewolf hybrid. She runs around town in a bathing suit terrorizing people. This is endlessly amusing to the local police department. When Frank is not drugging Trudy, he is sexually harassing Trudy’s friend Sally (Suzie Lawler). Frank turns Sally into the permanent monster that is inherently promised by a Frankenstein narrative. The monster is a man in a very masculine looking mask. There is noting remotely feminine about the monster, which is not created from the only daughter in the story, which is not Frank’s daughter anyway. A better title would be: Frankenstein is Sexually Harassing Someone’s Daughter’s Friend, Eventually Turning Her Into a Man. I guess that doesn’t fit on the marquee. On the plus side, Frank’s monster is better behaved than his creator; it knocks on the front door of the house before revealing itself. 

If this sounds at all complicated, it really isn’t. Because of the thin plot, Frankenstein’s Daughter contains one of my favorite elements to be occasionally inserted into movies from the 1950s: a performance by a rock band. The Page Cavanaugh Trio, a white bred-pseudo rock group, does a couple of numbers to fill out the run time. It’s a nice break in the action for both the actors and the audience. I felt refreshed after their songs, fully prepared to return to watching people run around in masks. Frankenstein’s Daughter is misguided, 50s-sci-fi fun. There isn’t much to it, but it manages to entertain on a lot of levels.  

‘Virgins from Hell’ (1987)

Virgins from Hell (1987)

This movie opens on a curious premise. The leader of a female motorcycle gang infiltrates a casino by seducing the owner. She gets him alone; naturally, he is expecting something. She fights him off, kicks his ass, and then the rest of the gang drives a jeep through the front door and robs the place. Why didn’t they just drive a jeep through the door in the first place? Such is logic not to be questioned in the Indonesian women-in-prison epic Virgins from Hell.  If logic were applied, you might ask if the leader of an international drug ring would really wear such a wide variety of cummerbunds. I have not been exposed to very much Indonesian culture; perhaps their drug lords do look like they have raided Prince’s Goodwill donation pile. As curious as his choice in wardrobe is the fact that he changes clothes often throughout the film. I tried hard to determine if this was just a continuity problem, but it really seems to be on purpose.

Eventually, the drug lord captures the gang and holds them hostage in a dungeon underneath a laboratory where he is developing an ecstasy-type drug that makes women want to have sex. There is nothing subtle about the plot. I am not a huge fan of the women-in-prison genre, but this one is interesting for its naiveté. Most of the scenes seem improvised, until the action sequences, which are meticulously staged and still relatively incompetent. The exploitation aspects of the film are hard to take seriously which removes some of the power from the prison situations. For me, it works. Loaded with low budget spectacle, Virgins from Hell comes across as a sort of primary color version of Rambo II.

‘The Pit’ (1981)

The Pit (1981)

The beginning echoes a hint of Stephen King’s high school horror story Carrie (1976). Jamie (Sammy Snyders) is a creepy little kid. However on the surface, Jamie’s problems don’t seem too far outside of the realm of natural curiosity. In spite of this, people seem to hate him on sight. His schoolmates. The librarian. Even elderly ladies in wheelchairs ridicule him. His father wants to write him off as a “nutcase.” What is it that repulses people so about Jamie? The answer becomes pretty apparent when becomes hot for his babysitter Sandy (Jeannie Elias). Jamie is also taking orders from a strange looking teddy bear.

Jamie’s parents take a cue from this especially difficult time in his life and decide to go on vacation without him. Sandy claims to be something of an expert babysitter having experience with troubled children. She exemplifies her expertise by parading around in towels and nightgowns. Jamie steals from her and stares at her chest while he asks how old her boyfriend is. The two form a real love/hate relationship.

With all this going on, you might forget the movie is called The Pit. It turns out that the kid has a pit. He feeds it. It eats things. It’s full of monsters. While the film’s tone is somewhat dire up to this point, this horror film takes on a Dennis the Menace quality as bodies start disappearing around town. I don’t wanna give too much away regarding the pit and its actual contents, but the movie is good clean fun in the vein of the 80s heavy metal inspired classic The Gate (1987) and wholly worth seeing because someone actually says, “come on in, the water’s great.”

‘The Octagon’ (1980)

Octagon (1980)

Although Japanese mythology can only vaguely pinpoint the origins of the ninja, Scott James can look at a roomful of corpses and determine that the cause of death “has to be ninjas.” Does it have to be ninjas? Couldn’t it be disgruntled employees? The Manson family? Ninjas are as good a guess as aliens, I suppose. Chuck Norris plays Scott James. James is, well, a guy like Chuck Norris. The film never fully explains James’ stake in the scenario except that he is an ex-soldier, ex-professional fighter, and he trained as a ninja. As the story progresses,  he acquiesces to call someone for “an assignment.” Who does he work for? It doesn’t matter. Scott James walks around kicking ass. Women swoon. Evil schemes fail. His entering a room is enough to stop a square dance.

The movie is mostly a series of fights with an occasional break thrown in to attempt a plot. Eventually, we are treated to the martial arts expo that we are all waiting for. James and all his cronies converge on his old training camp run by his arch nemesis Seikura (Tadashi Yamashita). There, ninjas get a chance to show off their ninja training; training that covers important topics such as “how to hang around under leaves until an intruder happens by” and “how to stop in the middle of a fight you are winning and swing your weapons around skillfully until you get kicked in the head.” And throwing stars. Yes, there are throwing stars.

The Octagon contains early appearances by “Oz” and Ghostbusters star Ernie Hudson and “man, that guy has been in everything” character actor Tracy Walter. The movie was written well before the Internet, before people had ready access to casual information. All that people knew about ninjas in 1980 was that they are awesome. That’s really all you need to know to enjoy The Octagon.

‘The New Barbarians’ (1982)

The New Barbarians: Warriors of the Wasteland (1982)

There are so many awesome things going on in this movie that I can’t keep up. Decapitations. Impractical weaponry. Futuristic codpieces. The opening is a model of a cityscape becoming engulfed with nuclear fallout while a cheap keyboard drum machine churns out an 80s action theme. This Italian pseudo- Road Warrior story is a typical low budget apocalyptic nightmare from the 80s.

After the 2019 nuclear war (heads up), a band of settlers are roaming, attempting to survive on their hunter-gatherer skills. On their tail are The Templars. The Templars want to wipe out humanity. They never say why they want to wipe out humanity, but they make a point of mentioning it often. As self-proclaimed  “ministers of revenge,” the Templars are doing a lousy job; there seem to be pockets of humanity all over the place. They drive techno cars endowed with a variety of weapons that impale, shred, and burn victims who are too stupid to run in a canted line. Fortunately for the Templars, battles take place on flat ground so everyone can run in a straight line away from their tyranny.

The film’s protagonist is an ex-Templar named Scorpion (Giancarlo Prete). The Templars want him dead. They never say why Scorpion is an ex-Templar, but the Templars do attempt to rape him in one of  the strangest scenes I have ever seen. Out of nowhere, Black Caesar star Fred Williamson appears in this mess as Nadir. Nadir and Scorpion don’t get along either, but they spend a lot of the movie showing up in the nick of time to rescue one another.

The 1950s were wide open to science fiction films thwarting the conventions of science since no one had ever been into space. People knew better in the 80s, but there was “what if” nuclear paranoia leaving the decade wide open to post-apocalyptic nonsense. Most of these movies are worth watching for one reason or another. Loaded with unnecessary stunts, terrible acting, horrible special effects, and an excessive amount of headbands, The New Barbarians: Warriors of the Wasteland is the cream of the crop.

‘The Being’ (1983)

The Being (1983)

The opening credits of The Being are simple white words against a black backdrop. No soundtrack. Martin Landau. That’s promising. Jose Ferrer. Even more promising. Ruth Buzzi? Yea, this is gonna be good. The Being is loaded to the breaking point with low budget 80s horror clichés. Teenagers act bad and get eaten. The mayor is attempting a cover up. Red lights appear in the background out of nowhere during attacks. No one is concerned about the fact that people are rapidly disappearing. The being only attacks after a dog, cat or falling pie tin scares the victim first. New ground is broken in the form of an Easter egg hunt where a toddler comes across the Being having a rest in a hole among the trees near the church. There is also a great scene involving a drive-in movie showing a movie about an amorphous being terrorizing teenagers. The drive-in is filled with moviegoers screaming at the screen and making out. Is there a good chance that the being will put in an appearance? I won’t ruin the surprise.

Martin Landau portrays Garson Jones, a scientist investigating possibly dangerous radioactivity in the area. The combination of the element of class Landau adds to the production versus a lack of research on the part of the filmmaker as to what a scientist might actually say makes for some wonderful moments such as Landau holding a Geiger counter over his wristwatch on a talk show. Ruth Buzzi surprises by providing some of the film’s most bizarre moments; namely bleeding through his eyes during a bizarre Wizard of Oz-type dream sequence and being killed off when her garage is destroyed during an operatic recital.

The Being itself is a bit of an enigma in that it seems to move quickly when it is lurking around on its own from the point of view of the camera, but is not very adept at chasing people when a pivotal character is in trouble. The Being is also randomly selective about whom it kills right away and whom it throws around and injures for the sake of the story. It absorbs people whole, but never seems to get any bigger. Sometimes it is a gelatinous blob, and other times it looks like a giant peanut with a deformed hand. As the movie progresses, the creature begins to take on a more definable shape, something of a bastardization of H.R. Giger’s design for Alien, but the creature is ultimately hard to pin down as it alternates between having hands and tentacles when one appendage becomes convenient over the other.

All in all, The Being wins as being great b-movie fun in that it maintains a good pace and has a little something for every permutation of low budget horror taste. No one “acts” for too long, the unintentional laughs do not languish and the gore is lit so you can’t tell how much they spent on it. You can generally tell what is going to happen from minute to minute, but the film seems aware of its shortcomings and acts accordingly. You won’t get bored. If you find yourself not liking what you are seeing, give it a minute. Something else will happen.

‘Scum of the Earth’ (1963)

Scum of the Earth (1963)

You know a movie is bad when Herschell Gordon Lewis doesn’t want his name on it. It was Lewis H. Gordon who directed this early-60s exploitation flick. I looked for information on Gordon’s pseudonyms and found no indication as to why he used them. Evidence suggests that he produced under a variety of names, including: H.G. Lewis, Georges Parades, Armand Parys, Sheldon S. Seymore, and R.L. Smith. It could be for reasons that the plot of Scum of the Earth explores; Lewis was involved in a lot of potentially sketchy pictures. There was some inherent danger in showing nudity in films and photography in the 50s and 60s. Scum of the Earth is an exploitation meta-narrative exploring the process that led to women taking off their tops in front of unscrupulous “art” photographers.

The movie plays out naively, in the style of a pseudo after school special. I’m sure all of these photo sessions didn’t take place after someone uttered the phrase “what kind of modeling is this?” According to the film, it was a slippery slope from “come around here and let me see your legs” to “ok, ok, off with the sweater.” The presumption is that you can make anyone do anything you want by threatening to call the police and implicate him or her in a nudie picture consortium. However, this element of the film may be somewhat steeped in reality. The film takes place during a time when pornography was well underground. The biopic The Notorious Betty Page (2005) makes it out to seem as if the girls in her circles were often willing participants, but presented the danger of arrest as a solid obstacle. Scum of the Earth pretends to be informative, showing the dark side of the industry. In the process, it exposes a lot of bare chests. It is genius in that it is what it is protesting: it is exploitive. The acting is terrible, but the elaborate system of blackmail is intriguing, if not somewhat unrealistic. I am starting to sound like one of those people who read Playboy for the articles. Scum of the Earth is fun to watch as a fan of Herschell Gordon Lewis films. Exploitation films from this era seem as if they are describing the lives of people who survived teenage delinquency films of the 50s like Blackboard Jungle. Obviously, nude photography is not the scourge of the land the movie makes it out to be. If you have to see one exploitation flick, it might as well be the one that tries to explain its industry.

‘Robo Vampire’ (1988)

Robo Vampire (1988)

One of my all time favorite “Mystery Science Theater 3000” lines has stuck in my head for so long that I involuntarily think about it on occasion when I am watching a convoluted film. The line is “meanwhile, in another movie.” I generally get a lot of satisfaction reflecting on that when it becomes appropriate. However this line was triggered so often during Robo Vampire it became maddening. Without a doubt one of the most confounding movies I have ever seen, director Godfrey Ho was clearly attempting to produce a film that would cash in on the success of Robocop (1987). He also seems to have made the film with his eyes closed. Light on the problems inherent in the making of this film might derive from one of many telling pieces of dialogue: “Orientals are a stubborn race.”

From what I can gather, there is a guy, and he controls vampires that have some hand in protecting a drug cartel. Somewhere along the way, a drug agent gets killed and is turned into a robot. Robots versus vampires; that part seems pretty clear. The rest of the movie primarily consists of roving gangs of kung fu people who run across each other from time to time. These incidents generally lead to passable karate, incompetent gunplay, or bouncing vampires. Fight scenarios are generally preceded by choice bits of dialogue like: “how dare you take my lover’s corpse powers and turn him into a vampire beast. Now we are condemned to a living death and we can never be together in the afterlife.” Since there is not a lot to latch on to with regards to describing the plot, I will share another favorite line of dialogue. Busting into a hive of drug smugglers, the robot makes the following Robocop-esque demand: “Drop your weapons in fifteen seconds. Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen.” Evidently his advanced brain did not process how much shooting can take place in fifteen seconds. What the hell, let me share another gem: “I’d pay a million, but it’s not up to me. The government’ll pay you (holding up two fingers) $20,000.”

This film is a the kung fu equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. The plot makes the films of David Lynch films seem like an episode of “Flipper.” It is too much fun to be missed, especially if you know anyone who has similar brain damage to the main character in Memento. I imagine someone like that would find this film very satisfying. There is much Internet pontification about the fact that the vampires bounce like rabbits. There is little that can prepare you for the sight of them. The big secret at play is that there are no actual robotic vampires. The title Robo Vampire is evidently a lot catchier than A Robot, Some Drug Dealers and Some Bouncing Vampires. This compels me to share one last bit of dialogue I felt was worth recording: “Bless our drugs.”