Reviews

There's something charming about Jess Franco's trash flicks: aimless, chintzy and so dreamy. That's the best kind of bad movie, the inspired type that makes you feel like your brain is melting, the standard decorum for a decent film gleefully shredded before your very eyes. You start off going 'This is so crappy, why am I watching?' until the mojo gets flowing and you've totally forgotten that golden compass supplied by countless tasteful pictures. You can't tell which way is up anymore; the map is gone, you're on Mars. Some turkeys try hard to be respectable and end up boring. Others don't bother, setting off to no man's land outright with their off kilter rhythms like some sort of bargain basement art house experiment. They don't give a sh*t.

That's the kind of movie this guy seemed to specialize in with his meandering zooms and incoherent plots, the I-don't-give-a-f*ck kind. He was pleasuring himself first and foremost, audience foreplay was a distant second if it was in the running at all. Maybe I shouldn't say this having sampled only a fraction of his output, maybe I need to travel far and wide in Franco land to really get a feel for the pervy territory but it's the only way I have to explain the weird allure these masochistic experiences have. They can be frustrating as hell and I'll still keep watching (the constant barrage of sex and nudity help).

This description matches VAMPIRE JUNCTION well, the plot is incomprehensible tedium with only a few trustworthy outposts to anchor us in its hermetic z-movie universe, to let us know we are passing through Franco land: Naked lesbo vamps, naked Lina Romay, western ghost towns, graphic sex verging on hardcore porn- it's all pretty batsh*t, pretty colorful. It's got the aggressive incoherence of a dream and just like somebody else's mind matinée that means boredom of the paint drying kind. Only fanatic Francophiles would stand a ghost of chance connecting all these dots, having plowed through a sizable wad of his creative ejaculations already. The non narrative approach doesn't automatically put some off like it does others; having hacked through a bunch of William Burrough's books I'm starting to find the whole thing invigorating in a nerdy way.

All the boredom is worth wading through to get to a handful of scenes, as is often the case with some directors. The strange randomness of the experimental soundtrack is the perfect accompaniment, repetitive notes & noises trapping you in a nightmare cul-du-sac straight out of David Lynch. The vamp twins getting off underlined by this stuff is hypnotic, their slow languid movements at first sorta funny then hypnotic like a weird erotic dance. When they attack and strip Romay during the end and do all sorts of wild contortions with their bodies like trapeze artists from hell- it's just the cherry on top of the fruitcake. It's a strange contrast with the sleaze, given its porno explicitness; at one point a vagina gets lathered up, delicately shaved and sucked on for blood.

I don't know how much Franco was deliberately surreal and how much he was just plain incompetent but it's nice to be surprised just the same. The right flavor of wtf moment is a thing to cultivate.

Another of Stanley's love letters to humanity. BARRY LYNDON is a tale of biological robots locked in a feedback loop, a period piece with its ossified guts ripped out to show us the ghost world beneath. Supercharged in that special Kubrickian way, it makes up for glacial pacing and austere remoteness with having every detail fine tuned for maximum aesthetic wattage; it's simply f*&king gorgeous, you can feel how fussed over every single square inch is. I can see why a lot can't stand this waxwork quality, even if that was kinda the whole point.

Ryan O'Neil is the perfect blank as Barry, forever out staged by the scenery, swallowed up by the vast expanse of setting his rags-to-riches story is set in; the stage outdoes the players. Through sheer luck he ascends the social ladder to high humorless society, becomes a gentlemen hob knobbing with the lizard elite only to lose it all in one fell swoop; his fortune, his title and his son. What goes up must come down, hard. It's only through tragedy, by falling that Barry-bot steps out of the storybook canvas Kubrick has entombed everyone in to act like a real boy, cutting the puppet strings and being spontaneous. Of course that's going against the no-flow and he's promptly ruined for it yet it's a triumphant moment just the same, a show of heart from a tin man.

BARRY LYNDON is a treasure trove of painterly images from a career renowned for them. Like a novel there is constant narration that's priceless for its incongruity with the movie. It's always undercutting the scenery, deflating the pomposity of what's shown in its hilariously dry Englishness; the bored voice of an all seeing eye. As brutally honest as the end title card is though BARRY LYNDON still cuts deep, the movie dares you to give a sh*t by constantly drumming in how pointless everything is, how lifeless and devoid of intrinsic spark these pretend humans are in all their fabulous ornamentation. Their castles, their costumes, their almighty manners: everything burns.

Kubrick is as cold as Eskimo pie but not in a spiteful, thumbing his nose way. His coldness was only functional, that of G_d peering down on ants (zoom out x10,000,000). He's not pointlessly sadistic like a lot of other 'warm' filmmakers I can think of and his dearth of spontaneity matched his pet themes perfectly. There's still moments of humanity in his museum movies, especially here where the opulent surroundings outshine the bloodless characters and their soul-sucking homogenization; those moments are hard earned. I dare you to keep a dry eye through the ending even if it's only drones going about the motions. Still, strewing clockwork guts across the screen, Kubrick will have none of the typical Hollyweird myth-making reassuring the audience how precious it is. He exposes the infinite loop human bots are stuck in, that thing called 'history'.

More films should really emphasize backdrops; it's disillusioning and reassuring all at once. OK computer?

Carpenter near the end of his golden 80's period: much more satisfying than his 90's slide into mediocrity. And it has Donald Pleasance! This time he's a crypto-Loomis catholic priest who, along with a cadre of college students and their professor are holed up in a deserted city church, fending off possessed vagrants attempting to infiltrate the premises. Inside a supernatural slime pulls their psychic strings, a Lovecraftian elder god trying to open the threshold and re-establish its void kingdom.

I never got why this underrated gem received so many bad reviews. It has a relentless apocalyptic dread that doesn't let up till the end credits and even then it's that rare horror flick to leave several non-gory images scarred upon the retina of your mind's eye. The acting and repartee is blah but the cosmology isn't. Hobo nation NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD/ATTACK ON PRECINCT 13 sounds pretty reactionary but it's really the mumbo-jumbo, pseudo gnostic science-philosophy behind the shlock that gives this movie its charge. Its not very coherent but you never doubt SOMETHING of epic Mordor-ian proportion is occurring, the doom is so thick you could scoop it off the walls.

The world Carpenter presents is very modern, alienated loners in a scorched earth that long ago killed God and replaced it with science's cold eyes. The rotting church where it all goes down is an anachronism, an antique surrounded by man-made mountains in the city jungle; its custodian priests self admitted 'salesmen'. Gathered round the toxic vat of Pure Evil slime in the church basement though, the congregation of student skeptics get passed the baton from the Brotherhood of Sleep. Utilizing the language of their deity science (the one eyed god, the one who claims not to be) they are violently re-born into a much larger, malevolent world. The act of re-phrasing an old myth in new lingo re-enchants the cosmos. Suddenly unfathomably ancient demons and puke spewing zombies are part of the equation; the students become true believers, scales rended from disbelieving eyes.

It's the existential dread, that feeling of teetering on the edge of a black hole that makes a mountain of this trashy b-movie molehill. This is Carpenter's blue-collar termite artistry before he sorta burned out. That he was making a movie with elements of the new paradigm (quantum physics) way back in the conservative 80's is testament to his awesomeness. Of *course* he made THEY LIVE!

It's the constant use of mirrors and nightmares though that really stick in my head and most other viewers, providing some sort of dreamy core to the exoteric shell of the movie. As a kid the idea of mirrors being doorways to other realms would've definitely won me over and indeed there are certain magickal practices involving mirrors and mirror halls. The heroes' shared dream space delivered as a fuzzy video single is indelible, striking some deep subconscious chord of primitive awe. The emergence of Catherine from the church, positioned like a martyred saint (that's what I thought anyway) with lights shining behind her is terrifying and definitely the stand out image of the film.

For such a naked Star Wars riff I think this underrated too. Murky and moody, the Cygnus spaceship where all the action takes place looks like a Gothic cathedral/industrial factory fun-house balanced on the edge of infinity, a gorgeous quantum whirlpool suspended in the heavens like the eye of God. The mad scientist story is rote and the googly eyed robots are a mismatch for the downbeat atmosphere but....the haunted house ghost ship with its huge deserted corridors & hooded monk-bots, the delicious & protracted destruction of the same and that awe inspiring conclusion with towering Mordor spires in tidal waves of fire & brimstone....there's definitely a darker, more visionary & operatic film laying underneath the generic happy meal shell. There's all sorts of exciting directions it could've gone that are only hinted at and its all pre-CGI so it has a certain weight to it, too. That last trip through the threshold could've pushed a lot further into 2001 territory. Like the critics said, it can't decide whether it wants to ape STAR WARS/STAR TREK or go off staring into the abyss. It needed to stop holding back & become the out 'n out horror movie it clearly wanted to be- in space no one can hear you scream! I've read it has a cult following & you can really see why. A very odd family flick, Di$ney could do interesting things despite itself.

Childhood, the land before time? This is another of those kid's movies I remember from the 80's that seemed poised on the knife-edge of being too dark for their audience but always pulled out an amazing balance . like RETURN TO OZ, NEVERENDING STORY, SECRET OF NIHM etc. there seems to be a delicate juggling act between grownup themes of loss & suffering and the more child inflected ones that seem to mostly get fanned now- cutesy loudmouthed sprites getting up to colorful shenanigans & other juvenilia. Soulless cotton candy. It seems they don't make em like they used to. Littlefoot & his motley dinosaur crew (Ducky, Petri, Spike & lamentably, Sara) embark through a ravaged prehistoric wasteland on their way to the Great Valley, pursued by the tyrannosaur Sharptooth. I saw this movie in the theater when I was 5 & it left its mark. Between the bleak setting & the giant T Rex, the death of Littlefoot's mother is sure to serve up just the right amount of trauma to your little tater tots; what would children's' cinema be without it? Trial by fire I guess. This could've easily swung out of balance; I read they cut 10 minutes of even scarier stuff and while I mourn making a slight childhood favourite slighter, I don't see how that extra weight wouldn't have overwhelmed the exquisite bittersweet balance going on here. It seems just cute enough for its age group & just downbeat enough not to be overly cloying like most of its kind. I mean seriously, it fits the subject matter but rarely do you see such apocalyptic landscapes in an animated movie for the under 7 set. It makes sense that no father to Littlefoot is shown; this is one dreary, god forsaken dinotopia. There should more of this kind of movie, the kind that deliver premature fun but don't condescend & talk down to the audience between colorful Di$nified antics. The kind you're not ashamed to return to years later, hopefully able to finally recognize the point of it all.

God cuts himself up with a razor & gives birth to Mother Earth who jerks off his corpse, inseminates herself & gives birth to son of the Earth, both brutally murdered by shrouded goons before being buried six feet under. The circle of life, and its moves us all! I don't know about the story or its occult significance but the scorched Earth presentation is sure something. I love when a movie can *truly* give you an Earth you've never visited before instead of re-heated CGI, the filmmakers gotta be tripping on distinct inner planes

to take you to these kind of thru-the-looking-glass destinations & that's what we get here, deep in gimmicky art film obscurity. The overly processed image is like the faint memory of a prehistoric past that never happened, a remembrance from out of time, interwoven with a dense sound-scape of ambient noise that induces this drug like stupor, this disconnect (complete unity?) between sound & image, a rorschach quality. Its going on in our heads as much as on screen, dreaming while awake. Bingo- another wormhole exposed on camera, a subconscious mindf*ck; its somehow familiar at the same time its alienating us into silent, aghast horror. I love this kind of thing, this conscious spell casting. Overlong & threadbare but these seem minor complaints for the chance to so deeply inhabit a parallel world, to gleam a midnight transmission from Mars, this sealed hermetic universe. Going by a lot of the comments here BEGOTTEN is the very definition of poser vagueness but I'd say don't over think it. In fact don't think it at all, just let it wash over like a nightmare, something about jittering humanoids and straight razors in a black & white nowhere land. Forget Susan Sontag & just bask in the sheer exhilaration of something so aggressively odd; go prospecting on Pluto. Even as just inspired noise from the abyss, burning away the calcified remnants of a million Hollyweird mediocrities & imposing its asymmetrical test pattern on our bar-coded brains, it works. A great WTF experience & the standout image HAS to be the God with Parkinson's jittering away in his chair, clumsily committing seppuku.

A right-brained pity parade with pop hooks. Most people aren't going to have the patience to make sense of it; you can't really blame them, it's easier to let the images wash over you (which are pretty unpleasant). Trying to really get into this is like the scene with Pink rearranging hotel room debris in schizo patterns...would you really *want* to understand? There's definitely a method to the madness, though. Its not as incoherent as it seems.

The album is like listening to a musical suicide note & the movie is like being inside a suicide's brain, every run on thought & recollection recreated in kaleidscopic detail. Along with Gerald Scarfe's delirious cartoons it's an epic montage of misery; words can't really describe it. In the end you can forgive it's miserablism, its earned & most others on the same wavelength don't have the same sheer visual inventiveness, anyway. It's possibly the greatest music video ever made. Mental disintegration is the perfect topic for this medium.

THE WALL is about a depressed rock star, reviewing his life through a drugged out haze in every ugly detail.The kind of life summary someone hitting rock bottom makes. Everything is pain & darkness, fresh trauma waiting around every corner. It's the visual equivalent of Edvard Munch's Scream painting (which the movie poster riffs on). One long wail of despair, it's only interested in the hellish depths, the kind of flick you don't put on often. Negating everything is the first step to accepting everything, however. Here, the journey through Pink's subconscious is set to song.

It's Roger Water's MTV therapy session & would be a total waste of time if he wasn't so masochistically honest about what a f*cked up human being he/we are. It's so harsh that it denies the truth of anything except pain, sweeping up much in its wake- mothers/lovers school fascism war - the whole convoluted system that sends people into these suicidal spirals by trying to mold them from day 1. They're not separable. It's in that spirit of total negation that someone can really bare to look closely at these things...paint it black.

What stands out in this operatic fever dream? Sarcastic schoolyard anthems, masked children on conveyor belts ground to paste, cruel teachers, self mutilating rock stars laying waste to mankind, screwing flowers, towering walls, trials & talking asses, explosions, worms, dead staring eyes- Its amazing how everything gets a call-out, a big summing up. It's all here. Fatherless boys & castrating mothers, goose stepping & falling bombs...this stuff is great. Roger Waters is a d*ick but Roger Waters also has balls to be retracing his steps through the labyrinth like he does here, It's not either/or. Exposing your inner dictator isn't a walk in the park. I'm really glad for movies like this, not only does it recreate what a nervous breakdown can feel like but goes further & holistically ties it back into society with the totalitarian stuff. Pink is a microcosm.

The wall itself makes me think of Wilhelm Reich's body armor idea, the muscular shielding people build to live in emotional war zones which quickly deadens them to *any* feeling. That in turn leads to things like shooting heroin, screwing groupies & committing mass murder to feel alive again (its utterly perfect how after the wall crashes only children are left, scrounging through wreckage). Critics who complained the film lacked resolution are dead wrong.

It's great that someone made the connection for rock audiences between pop stardom & fascist demagoguery, too. It's done in a way where you're not sure whether to chuckle or quake. The hammer & sickle pageant that erupts into rioting while an exhilarating melody plays has to be the most jaw dropping moment I've seen in a musical. You feel guilty for getting into the tune with beatings & rapes on-screen, the racial slurs & skinned heads. Its blood curdling & absurd. Way to turn a cherished form inside out & shovel its steaming guts in the faces of the fans you hate, Roger. That's entertainment!

There's worse sins than trying to shovel everything & the kitchen sink in but the album/movie wants to articulate the agony of it all so completely that it gets numbing quick, a constant bludgeon of horror & despair, the ultimate bad trip flick. It can be overwhelming if you're not prepared. The music provides the characters, the story, everything else is really just a framework for an apocalyptic day dream.

I love Pink Floyd. Along with Radiohead they made the scariest rock music I've heard. I never connected much with pop until I heard these guys. THE WALL is the last album where the group was firing even close to all cylinders, half brilliant & half awful. I don't need these kind of pitch black tunes as much now but it was sure comforting when I did.

Standout image: hard to choose just one but probably the flower devouring her mate. Best song: again hard but likely 'Comfortably Numb', which oughta be the rock anthem of the whole 20th century

'The dumbing down of humanity is represented by a shift which occurs in the brain when we watch television. Activity in the higher brain regions (such as the neo-cortex) is diminished, while activity in the lower brain regions (such as the limbic system) increases. The latter, commonly referred to as the reptile brain, is associated with more primitive mental functions, such as the "fight or flight" response. The reptile brain is unable to distinguish between reality and the simulated reality of television. To the reptile brain, if it looks real, it is real.' -Alex Ansary

'It is like confusing the menu with the dinner. You can become so enchanted with the symbols that you confuse them with reality. This is the disease from which all civilized people are suffering. We are in the position of eating the menu instead of the dinner, of living in a world of words & symbols. This causes us to relate badly to our material surroundings.' -Alan Watts

Wow. Anyone taking notice of our wall-to-wall media oppression will get shivers watching this; Cronenberg the intellectual was obviously doing his late night reading (Baudrillard, McLuhan, William Burroughs) before this stuff became more obvious to the front lines. His eggheaded insight definitely separates his first movies (SHIVERS, RABID, THE BROOD) from the rest of the exploitation pack, a b-movie director that could back up his T&A with something like substance. Decades later & we know how his story turned out.

For VIDEODROME, Cronenberg made a horrific commentary on the media-scape & its myriad of prison reality tunnels foisted upon the sleeping public. The technology here is prehistoric but the penetrating insight isn't. Obsessed with mutation & transformation, Cronenberg comes at his pet themes from the media standpoint this go round: continuous exposure to graphic violence & sex causes hallucinations in the minds of unaware audiences, here small time producer Max Renn (likeable sleaze James Woods) looking for the next hot thing. This is tricky territory, even today when the virtual reality addiction reaches pandemic proportions & society continues to splinter into some strange unacknowledged hypnosis hell, courtesy of the MSM dream factory.

Slowly but surely, continuous exposure to the Videodrome show, broadcast secretly reconfigures Renn's entire inner landscape,involving him in an occult war between shadowy cabals, making him into something entirely new by erasing the previous identity, paving the way for a new borderless incarnation amongst the airwaves....esoteric stuff, real paranoia & would look totally incoherent to image junkies unaware of what substratum this freak movie transmission is coming from, a jumbled mishmash of nightmare psychedelia, pretentious philosophizing & charmingly antiquated machinery. And sex & violence. Its cold & clinical with a sparse electronic score, par for course from the director who examines humanity like a bug under his microscope.

Again I'm going to say that catching this movie at 3am, waiting for the sexy fun & instead getting a dour, doomy expose on media black magic & sorcery at 11 years old....yeah the point was wasted on me. Still, something about this kept calling me back over the years & now its one of my favourites. Look closely & you too can observe just the kind of bleed through this movie describes, a sophisticated multidimensional control apparatus that operates right beneath our noses, masquerading as cathartic entertainment. Look closer to observe how fantasy and reality overlap.The Videodrome agents manually insert a videocassette into Max's chest in one scene, 'programming' him into violent mayhem (i am the video word made flesh). He embraces the TV in another, merging with a giant pair of screen lips in creepy sexual union. This stuff is ace. People assume they are self determining when massive brainwashing is always going on in the background, eating away at them. Its satanic.

Now what I find really fascinating is that Cronenberg apparently caught the germ of what would become VIDEODROME from a viewing of infamous porn director Joe D'amato's EMANUELLE IN America, a breezy blue movie that happens to contain one scene of graphic snuff footage. Taking place as film within a film, its a cruddy silent 8mm print of tortured women in some nameless banana republic. At first it seems completely incongruous to the rest of the movie, a jarring tonal shift amid care free frolicking but on closer examination seems more like a subconscious glimpse of the hedonistic round-the-world plot, a peekaboo look of whats really lurking beneath the sunny sexy fun. Haunting.

I wonder how Cronenberg sees his own contributions to this insane state of affairs, being himself amongst the sorcerers. This is maybe one movie to make you swear off movies forever, if you've been lucky enough to resist the temptations of the New Flesh.

Four intrepid westerners travel to the tropical island Matool only to find the resident doctor and staff battling a living dead epidemic that threatens to spill over into the wider world.

An obvious attempt to cash-in on Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD, standinng on its own merits Fulci's drive-in opus is still one somber cheese horror flick. I mean the movie opens on gushing head shot; you *know* what you're in for.

Much of the Italian exploitation industry was based on copying American trends and ZOMBIE was no different. That's where the similarity pretty much ends. It reaches its own pinnacle of nihilistic greatness in several scenes (side-by-side some undeniable movie ham). Romero's film was satirical, Fulci's living dead quartet (THE BEYOND, GATES OF HELL and to a lesser extent HOUSE BY THE Cemetery) is grand guignol. Strictly as a fright flick, it works way better than DAWN (the better film). It's got atmosphere to burn, not brains. The story is nothing, a necessary evil for setting up a brutal & eerie finale where the audience gets what it came for: a zombie apocalypse, one of the best because it predates 'zombie apocalypse' as common parlance. It's still classical monster movie territory, just updated with 70's ennui & grind-house guts. It's not a metaphor for global capitalism and the legions of brainless sheeple. It's not a snarky potshot. It's very easy to make fun of; despite the gore, it's still romantic about its pessimism. Now we got torture porn.

Pacing wasn't one of this director's strong points but endure the tedious beginning half (to about the shark scene) and enjoy his real strengths. What has plot got to do with it? That's a clothesline for this notorious hack to hang his peculiar set-pieces, to go bat-sh*t crazy with blood & zooms & pulsing electric noises that hurt your head. None of that loopy fleapit surrealism; ZOMBIE is the most earth-bound of his cadaver quartet, its actually coherent. The plot is on auto-pilot, something to get out of the way so Fulci can focus on the grotesque, flexing his muscles without burdens like character development and naturalistic dialogue. That's all rote; Fulci just aches to tear off the funeral veil and glimpse the maggots already. As a ringleader of gruesome and dreamy images he was ace (and obviously knew his limitations if the aggressively nonsensical BEYOND is any indication). Several of his films make for very strange viewing, like arty gore flicks. Concentrating on violence and decay it finds its groove and proceeds right through to the end. It screams the 70's and the entire burnt out, worn down mood. That's always spoke to me as a kid, personally. It showed openly the all-pervasive taint that movies in the 80's seem to go back to hiding. Horror flicks don't do that (that's why they're horror flicks).

European horror valued style over plot and adhering to this dictum Fulci batters us with unrepentant doom. The atmosphere, simmering like a miasma of death is great for such a small comic book b-movie. The heat and funk of rotting bodies is vivid; dirt and decay are prevalent, the feel of cloying sand and spoiled, gore encrusted earth. The beat of voodoo drums frequently hovers off screen, always heard never seen. The cheesy synthesizer gets more unnerving as the film goes on, emphasizing the delicious feeling of inevitable death surrounding us with its oppressive monotony. From ridiculous to stark. The small cast of zombies is also a plus; it lets Fulci realize his vision of the undead: shuffling, moaning, graceless creatures melting under the tropical sun, way more ghastly than Romero's blue-tinted hordes. They're hideous. The memorable movie poster is a hypno-putrid snapshot; it made me seriously ache to see this as a kid. Less is more.

The cemetery scene particularly is a tour-de-force, the point where plodding turns into a breathless rush towards oblivion. A rising corpse towers over a petrified victim with worms crawling out eye sockets. A loathsome close-up before its lunges toward the screen, biting out the girl's throat, a blood geyser pouring out with ridiculously gross clogged drain noises on the soundtrack- the biggest baddest looking cadaver you've ever seen. The mournful score breaks in after, rendered epic now, an electronic Gothic hymn playing over collapsing graves, hands & arms & heads rising up from a dreamless sleep. Still one of the finest scenes of any zombie film, period.

Fulci's zoom-happy cam is here too: rubbing our faces in gleeful man-eating, he displays the characteristic lack of restraint that's earned him his cult. The gore flows plentiful so fan boys should be pleased on that gut level. The army of stiffs advancing on our cardboard heroes at the climax, engulfed in flames as the main theme pounds on is indelible. These zombies are slooooow, not today's berserkers. The pace of life in 1979 was a lot different.

Rotten, tacky, glorious. Standout image here: corpses shuffling down the Brooklyn bridge as rush hour traffic drives on below along a NY skyline, credits crawling past.

So much has already been written about this viddy, dissected & commemorated & pilloried like maybe no other member of the Pantheon Of Kubrick that any more hoopla is redundant. There's really not much else left to say when it comes to some things, especially controversial classics like this- you're just adding to the growing pile of he said/she said yay or nay. That's why I focus so much on no-name trash.

As a teenager watching this, I was probably the kind of spectacle addicted junkie Kubrick was thumbing his nose at, waiting eagerly for the infamous scenes of sex & violence while not really paying attention to the rest. My grandparents unknowingly strolled into a showing during its original 70's run and walked out mid way through, disgusted. I didn't really get it back then in all but the most obvious of ways; all that stuck with me about this gorgeous shot of ice water was the colourful clutter, the day-glow X rated minutiae stuffing the sidelines while gleefully insane cartoon characters strut back n forth in paroxysms of sound & fury, totally oblivious to their outlandish surroundings.

Its been said that there's really no other opening like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE's, that slooooow pull back on statue over statue of luridly posed pretty polly with a trademark Kubrickian glower at the dead centre courtesy of Mcdowell- its very memorable. Than there's the chorus line of Christs, back slapping plastic Jesus' shot like song and dance men in Alex's room that recalls a scene from Jodo's HOLY MOUNTAIN where the Thief screams in despair as the camera zooms out on a warehouse of copyright Christs piled together in towering mountain-caps of commodification. Later on still we get the cat lady, surrounded by pornographic paintings & pussies, ordering our lead droog to be CAREFUL with her gigantic sculpted penis: 'Its a very important work of art!'.

Again and again acts of ultra-violence and in & out enacted unblinkingly before a panoply of warped popular culture, neon frescoes of trash art kitsch littering the frames like the rubble of some unseen psychic meltdown. This viddy nailed with frightening accuracy the gleaming post modern sheen of our full blown covert dystopia, the apocalyptic landscape of modern life where pod people move through an over mediated social arena, oppressed at every turn by over sexed infotainment and various other subliminal mind f%&ks while all the time insisting it has absolutely nooo baring on their own behavior. Clockwork orange indeed. What if the world ended and no one noticed?

Its like the characters in the film exist in some hellish time warp, all sorts of incongruous fashions and designs crammed into an unwieldy hodgepodge of cultural schizophrenia. It looks at once painfully retro and smoothly futuristic. Even the nadsat dialogue is a melting pot of alien patois, slang and contemporary words jumbled together into a kind of demonic poetry. Truly I've seen no other movie prophesize the multicultural, Orwellian sh*thole England was to become like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.

No wonder this flick figures into several mind control conspiracy theories, that it even provoked copycat crimes. I wonder how Kubrick felt about hitting the nail on the head so completely that his work about brainwashing and hyper-reality seemingly turned out its own earnest droogies, unable to differentiate between fantasy and reality. The biggest irony though is that even before the Ludvico treatment, Alex Delarge was a nothing but a clockwork orange.

Here we reach the half way point of our saga (FREDDY VS JASON doesn't count, being half a Jason & half a Freddy movie). Any flick with the title THE FINAL CHAPTER is guaranteed a hat trick of sequels up its sleeve, but to all intents & purposes- the boogeyman of Crystal Lake has been vanquished, the madness forgotten, the legend retired. It will take something brand new to get the blood coursing in this petrified old saw, to justify another jaunt down dead teenager lane. Can you really blame them for adding a fresh coat of paint on the formula when they just as easily could've Xeroxed a straight re-tread of the last 4 flicks? That's saying something because as movies go, the Friday THE 13TH series has to be one of the most joyfully repetitive of all time. Change is more frightening than an axe wielding psycho.

Though hacked to death in our last installment, the specter of Jason Vorhees-that watcher in the woods, that mass murdering momma's boy- continues to haunt young Tommy Jarvis, he who slew the beast. Grown from precocious tweener to brooding adolescent with a look in his eye that guarantees he'll be taking an automatic to show n tell, Tommy boy is moving into a halfway house for troubled youths as our film opens, populated by a colorful cast of malcontents & head cases that make master Jarvis look sane. Primarily there's Reggie, a tough talking token black/ precocious brat who's about as street as the one Big Bird lives on. What do these animal crackers have in common? They're the latest collection of teenage fodder, the annoying nobodies whose sole purpose is to die in elaborate execution scenes.

The only difference this time is that Jason Vorhees himself is a no-show, the murders themselves authored by a totally average joe. This particularly enrages fan boys, who as a rule are fickle as a pack of soccer moms. You watch with eyes peeled as a hulking man in a hockey mask plows through the standard teenage wasteland, dispatching neer-do-wells & nincompoops with savage relish only to have the blood soaked rug pulled out from under when the big reveal comes, Scooby-doo style. Ouch. I don't have much of a problem with the big twist of A NEW BEGINNING; It adds more texture to the mythos by deepening the urban legend of the Crystal Lake slasher. Jason is here but he's not, his presence incorporeal & second-hand, an inspiring influence at best. All pervading evil. If you think about it it's creepy how he haunts like a ghost, his spirit so dogged that it functions like an infectious disease on pliant minds, inspiring them to take the mantel of avenging angel of the backwoods. It's an acknowledgement of how much power the story has accrued by this point, testament that Jason lives on in his world through folklore like a dark god. We the audience live with this immortal pop culture phantasm (as we do Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Pinhead etc) & the people of Crystal Lake do the same.

What's more radical is the jarring tonal shift, seriously differentiating itself from its forbears by imbuing an almost cartoony flourish to the material. The grit n grain, that homespun quality that made the first FRIDAYS so charming gets replaced with quasi-studio slickness. It's an impasse point where everything gets sillier. The lazy summer nihilism of the early camp blood flicks, their going-nowhere fast feeling gets progressively watered down from here on.

The best scene is when annoying tard Joey gets chopped into pieces before our disbelieving eyes. It's a guilty scream. I rewound it over & over with my friend as we guffawed over clouds of smoke. A lonely, sensitive lad getting brutally axe murdered, smears of chocolate on his face (as the blade cracks his spine) letting you know its all for yucks. You feel bad for laughing but it's too deliberately pathetic & manipulative to lose any sleep over. Politically incorrect hilarity that if you showed a bunch of kids would still play well. I mean, this is definitely the kind of wavelength I was on at 12.

Likewise, the other spam is at their height of dated obnoxiousness: robot dances, goth regalia, rednecks that make the DELIVERANCE freaks look like they have all their chromosomes, paint peeling profanity, jerri curls- A NEW BEGINNING is almost parody, usual slasher tropes blown up to lurid dimensions. This isn't to mention all the fun bags on display- we got us the most loosely lewd & casually vulgar of the bunch here. Its like a slasher cartoon.

Shrill & campy yeah, but Friday 5 maintains balance, a core respect for the mythos that isn't quite there for part 6, whose humour is intrusive & insecure. One scene there went as far as to break the 4th wall just to let us know how above all this Jason stuff it was. That was bloodless & ashamed of itself, this is not. It's goofy as hell yet still mean as a rattle snake. It doesn't let its self awareness ruin the show, just playfully tweek it. The winking isn't condescending. It really *is* like a Friday THE 13 for kids & I think that may be as much an issue for naysayers than just the non presence of the resident boogeyman. Alex Jackson over at I VIDDIED ON THE SCREEN dubbed it 'cheap Spielberg'- an apt description of this odd but no less wholesome flavor of Friday.

Cheers

I like ugly films, that aren't sterile and prettified by superficial gloss. This leads me into a lot of shady areas, because the spotless, empty media we do have is utterly retarded & absolutely everywhere. I'll happily stand for the movies that use this tangibility in entirely negative ways. If something makes me feel like showering after and praying to Jesus while I rock to & fro- mission accomplished. Even if it's repulsive & indefensible, it's still alive. If I'm going to watch movies I want to feel this stuff, not be pillow talked by processed slop. I open like this because this flick is surely one of those shows that makes you ponder taking a pumice stone to your eyeballs. Hallelujah. Make no mistake, Jess Franco is dye-in-the-wool pervert & not shy about it. He obviously has an…affinity for the material that makes for a creepy sort of dedication. He isn't joking with his sick WIP cycle, they aren't easy to laugh off like the others I've seen.

The gloriously tacky ILSA series is consistent in its portrait of the inquisitor madam & her devotion to pain- glamorous, beautiful, power loving & sexually insatiable, one moment smooth & pleasing and the next sadistically merciless- but it hops back n forth all through the 20th century, from hot spot to hot spot, drawn to evil like a fly to dung. It helps to jettison any idea of chronology here & just think of Ilsa as a kind of vampire, popping up wherever there's bad vibes to leech on a massive scale; deposed & killed in one era and rising in another to feed again- you can't keep a good woman down. Her first adventure was the exploitation classic SHE WOLF OF THE SS, where Ilsa found herself right at home with the goose stepping jackboots of the Third Reich, then HAREM KEEPER OF THE OIL SHEIKS where she frolicked in a desert hellhole, onto the TIGRESS OF SIBERIA which found Ilsa getting up to her old tricks in the gulags of Soviet Russia & finally here- running a banana republic asylum in typical hands-on style.

Dyanne Thorne's third reprisal of the blood thirsty succubus is a grind house goody, but only viewers blessed with strong constitutions need bother. It isn't the typical Chicks-in- chains enterprise that a trash mongrel expects, where bad taste is balanced by rival factors like low production values, wooden acting or camp sensibility (HAREM KEEPER).It includes the standard ingredients the genre demands yet takes them so far out that those deflating factors aren't enough to dampen the stench. I've read the charge that this jaunt down debauchery lane might've been a firecracker in its day but the preceding three decades have softened its bite.

no no NO

As the movie's titular warden, Ilsa reigns supreme over a mental hospital for deviant women. While the inmates have full frontal romps in filthy public showers with butch lesbo guards leering on, Ilsa relaxes after a long day of depravity at the office, sinking her generous bosoms in a luxuriant bubble bath, inter-cut with a prisoner gunned down while trying to escape sans underwear (no inmate here is permitted the privilege of undergarments- yea, that's the level were on here). This prompts the victim's sister Abby to have herself committed to expose the goings down at Las Palamas before more innocents die at the hands of our sadistic bitch goddess and her lackeys. Predictably, Ilsa's magic touch has transformed the hospital into a den of twisted sex games, a gulag for political prisoners, a snuff movie production house. Got all that?

What a gust of foul air. The bottom barrel method captures every sq mm of grime, minimalistic compared to the last two; slow but vicious. They were colourful and this is low-key & subdued: a slow burn. It sure floored me, sneaking the Anchor Bay reissue during my teenage years & imagining the delicious horrors that waited. Finally I would see a Jess Franco movie, one of those reviled raunch-o-ramas; a real test of my mettle. Non stop nudity, acid douches, human toilet paper, electro shock therapy, whippings, beatings, rapes- yeah, we're not in Kansas anymore Toto. Sigh.

The constant barrage of dehumanization is numbing & any technical deficiencies just get swallowed up by the atmosphere of jaw dropping mean spiritedness. Just that general atmosphere of extreme human backwardness can hurt your head after awhile. Again, Jess Franco takes the skeleton of old comic book adventures/exotic serials & injects all his usual sexual sickness into it. Dyanne Thorne's hammy accent is not so yuck-worthy when she's holding a plastic bag over someone's skull or jamming needles close-up into flesh; I never feel more like I'm wading through the twisted jerk-off fantasies of a pulp obsessed teenager than during Franco's WIP stuff. It's a cartoon shot with porno flatness to authentically capture the intensity of S&M.

After the tongue-in-cheek approach of its predecessor the randy little Spaniard takes the series back to its roots: undiluted in-your-face shock value, with a heavier emphasis on eroticism only un-softened by any of his usual dreamy proclivities, save one scene. What we're left with is a bleak parade of suffering, extreme sleaze only amplified by the crude, dingy realization of the material. Jess puts all other WIP movies to shame: its not light naughty fun; its pervy uncle,goose-you- under-the-dinner table uncomfortable.

Standout image here: a woman being calmly asphyxiated by Ilsa, the bag over her face inflated by death rattles as her eyes bulge. Ugh. This will be what stays with me from THE WICKED WARDEN. People with bags over their heads are just plain horrifying; they've been reduced to giant veal cutlets in a special way.

I like Jason. He's similar to Michael Myers in that he's basically a little boy trapped in a monster's body, horribly murdering any representative of the outside world that dare impede on his territory. He guards his forest sanctuary like an avenging angel, delivering swift old Testament justice to all trespassers that don't bother to heed the legend of Crystal Lake. From his POV these lost lambs are obnoxious, empty shells unworthy of life; they taunt him with their loose morals & care free attitudes. Tormented as child, he strikes back at the rootless society that rejected him. A monster like Freddy is impure, sexually aware unlike the solemn purity of Michael or Jason (he also never shuts the &%$# up). Both are golems, silent and implacable. There's a spoiled innocence to them, while the bastard son of 100 maniacs was basically damned from the start. You can almost sympathize with Jason, like all good monsters. They are true outsiders.

This is the 2nd entry in the epic Friday anti-saga & the first to star our resident boogeyman, still unrecognizable from the legend he would eventually become. He isn't a hulking zombie here, festering slowly into oozing pieces. Clad in flannel & sporting a burlap sack where the hockey mask should be, several inches shorter & creeping through the woods like a greasy bushman, housed in a shack worshipping the severed petrified head of his dead mother: he's a congenitally deformed mongoloid. Yee haw. Part 2 veers closer to drive-in territory than any other entry, of all its siblings it deserves to be seen on a outside screen the most, surround sound crickets chirping at you in the humid night air. When the big reveal comes Jason is shown to be a backwoods elephant man sporting a shock of ginger hair(!).It makes me think of every bad inbred redneck joke & campfire sing-along about hook-handed slashers and that's what's great about this much maligned series: its one of those silly fireside yarns that refuses to die, that you get mad at yourself for being creeped out by on the way back to your tent. You make fun sure, but you still enjoy yourself. Its shoddy & no frills like an over recited folk standard, treading the same tired ground again & again with dogged determination. Its goals are modest but it never fails to deliver. And it may speak in the grunts of the short-bus traveller but that doesn't make it less valid. I guess you could say that of a lot of 'bad' movies though; there can still be a sort of poetry there.

Even for a Jason movie though this is scaled down & minimalistic, laid back like a summer vacation in the roasting sun. It all sort of hangs out loosely, lazily, pausing occasionally for a quick death then getting back to the fun loving teenagers, your typical cast of walking spam. It begins on a perfect note with a childhood rhyme, the man-child's boots clomping swiftly through rain puddles. The standard recap that would later play like a 'greatest hits' is here a nightmare by way of part 1's final girl. We follow her through her empty house, damaged by her experience at Crystal Lake. Jason's sharp eyes track Alice slyly from around shadowy corners in the stalker's POV: good old fashioned, jump-scare slasher stuff. The fun n games climaxes with the discovery of Mrs. Vorhee's severed head laying in her fridge like a spoiled entrée, right before an ice pick enters Alice's skull from behind & the pre-credits explode onto screen with a flurry of screaming strings. Lean, mean introduction. We're privy to the usual hedonistic past times from there: skinny dipping, drinking, horseplay- the watcher in the woods always lurking nearby, staring out from the bushes, occasionally claiming a victim then melting back into thin air. Until he moves in for the kill, Jason haunts like a ghost.

There is a couple great iconic shots in this flick that make for series standouts. The first is the paraplegic rolling down the steps backwards in his chair, thunder lightning & rain pouring down with a big ole meat cleaver buried in his skull- a great image and one of the best kills of the mythos, right up there with sleeping bag-meets-tree & pureed banana. It's so callous & harsh that it reminds me of the fantastic slow pullback on the rocking chair girl with the bag over her face in BLACK Christmas; you can really feel the ice water in this show's veins. Most kills in slasher movies are perfunctory, with only a couple memorable offings in any one entry, maybe more if it's authored by a hack of uncommon talent. This is one of those that your mind's eye can retroactively flashback to in the dead of night. I like how these kill scenes white-out like a camera taking a photo too, underlining them. You'd expect gimps to be spared the awful Kentucky fried payback of DELIVERANCE era Jason,right up there with preggos, pets & little children but no.

The other is the constant reappearance of Pamela Vorhees's beef jerky head. Its a spooky little detail that contributes a lot to the hick bleakness of this one, long before the cheese of the Kane Hodder years. Its presence in the final sequence, seated like a talisman at the center of Jason's home base makes for real eeriness, a bit of texture that unfortunately wouldn't live on. An incestuous shrine of motherly love that Jason must pay homage too...

I've pondered recently what makes the most rewarding time at the movies and it has to be: sitting in front of a screen and being suddenly star struck by the most peculiar yet familiar feeling of unreality. It's like the film itself has tripped the right combination and there I am dreaming wide awake; I'm not real, the room I'm in isn't real and the only thing that matters is the dream in front of me. It's not the feeling of being taken away from my own world into the story's I'm talking about exactly and what most people seem to be referring to when discussing watching films- it's something subtler. It's not the experience of being in a different world it's the experience of dreaming of being in a different world, like the difference between sleepwalking and lucid dreaming.What constitutes the right pattern or configuration to flip the lock and open this trap door in my head I dunno but it's a rare experience just the same (at the movies anyway). When it happens it's something to savor.

Dorothy Lemay comes upon two cowgirls by a campfire. Some lifeless porno talk while a lonely wind blows (this is how silly this stuff actually sounds when you're not horny) then the psychedelic guitars strike and the audience enters hyperspace. The song in this scene is 'Ring of Fire' if it were performed by Martians over hardcore lesbian sex, mocking the original by turning her inside out, hollowing out her guts & reassembling the bones in a jigsaw Rorschach so it only superficially resembles the parent(like the plastic cowboy set). Listen to the exaggerated hillbilly voice the singer uses to belt it out. The whole flick is iffy but here surely there's no way to jerk off here, not unless you're picking up your own deep space signal. Even the performer's sexing is stilted & affected, artificiality being the point; all these layers of unreality reflect back on each other like a TV on TV on a TV- it's a neon waxwork christened in c#m. Every time I hear this song now I nearly enter a fugue state, that menacing electro beat and mid air collision of ambient fender noise- warp speed ahead!

This is the only time a porno has done this to me, that kind of transcendent-grade mind-f%#k. See the whole flick for its bizarre, nightmare visions only incidentally criss-crossed with explicit sex sure; it's one the best XXX films I've seen. See it for the best on- screen use of Satie's Gymnopedie too (wink) but especially see it for this one scene; it's some sort of worm hole lassoed onto camera.

A few years ago I read a novel where this flick figured in the plot. It was about a film editor on an obsessive quest, searching through scads of old movies for a hidden symbol in certain scenes that pointed toward some huge, hidden conspiracy obscured from profane eyes. I wish I could remember the title.

Returning home, Joy (Sharon Mitchell) is attacked in her apartment and raped. Instead of wailing & teeth gnashing though Joy gleefully embraces this assault to an insane degree, turning a potential hot potato into high farce in a way that would've had Andrea Dworkin doing somersaults six-feet-under. Joy, in what summarizes the genre (hell, the era) screams out her high rise window while topless 'MORE', turning the act on its head by literally raping anybody person in her immediate vicinity. Soon, her flagrant actions inspire other frustrated femmes to go hunting for a satisfactory screw, breaking into married couple's bedrooms and taking the nearest spouse by force.

It becomes a grass roots revolution as perfect strangers copulate their brains out in public, city crime hilariously plummeting as steam gets collectively blown off (pardon the pun). Yes siree, it's the quintessential 'Free Love' ideal preached by the flower power choir that was supposed to establish our new golden age. The idea of 'love' as liberation is the thesis of this amusingly naive flick, a half-glimpse of a sexual utopia (pornotopia?) that never materialized.

The status quo here is represented by the horribly pun-named Lt. Handcock. Finding jobs untenured, taxes unpaid and endless screwing couples on the streets, Handcock takes the lead in returning safe boring normalcy in the wake of hurricane Joy. The Establishment must target the revolutionary hero to quell the rebellion's spirits. Too late, Joy's new gospel has reached too many willing ears. A firm non-believer and staunch eeevil patriarchal traditionalist, the LT. is finally foiled though by Joy's irresistible allure and defects to the other side.

In one particularly outrageous scene, Joy has Handcock penetrate her with his service pistol (no his *other* service pistol) fellating the gun barrel along with Handcock. Remember, frequent early criticisms of porn claimed women were often forced into performing on camera at gunpoint- again an explosive concept reduced to chuckles, the menace and misogyny offset by Joy's cries of enjoyment, Handcock's inexperience and hesitancy and the light-hearted tunes all robbing the sequence of its edge. Its just another taboo to be brought hilariously down, one more phallus swallowed.

With Handcock converted to the new philosophy, Joy flees her hometown of NY in exile, the better to soil new seeds in distant lands still under the tyranny of sexual repression. At first the viewer thinks Joy, walking through the arrival gate & rebuffing friendly overtures, has reverted to her former slave state. Inhibited, frigid, afraid- but then, Joy of Joys, she heaves up her luggage and marches straight into the men's room, crisis of faith overcum in taking on four willing bathroom studs. After the spent suitors exit the washroom, all grins and chuckles, Joy turns to screen: 'Oh, I didn't know you were there' smiling suggestively whilst unbuttoning her blouse....Vive la revolution!

Self aware porn, Joy preaches the benefits of sexual healing and the only real cruel misuse of this new found power is Joy's stairwell rape by pursuing agents of the Man. Made intentionally ugly and hateful, the Establishment tries to hurt Joy by perverting her own teachings.

An entertaining free love fantasy, the visualization of a stunningly naive thought process. Its pleasantly optimistic and anticipatory with an enlightened madonna/whore to guide us infidels through the birth pangs of a New Age. It's quite the porno pipe dream, worth a few chuckles/boners. Too bad it turned into a nightmare we've yet to awaken from. Star Sharon Mitchel was brutally raped in reel life.

Some parts that didn't totally suck: The music. Through-out all three prequels the score is one area that's beyond reproach, of a standard clearly above the actual films. It supplies most of the emotion when dialogue and characterization doesn't. The primary theme of AOTC is no different, providing the kind of sweet melancholy a doomed love affair requires with an epic scope for the backdrop of war. It's incredibly beautiful and heart-achingly sad. Brief moments of tenderness caught on the battlefield as an even greater shadow looms- that's Across the Stars.

The twilight chase through Coruscant's underbelly, all glittering skyscrapers & flying cars, a maze of never-ending cityscape scrolling past at full speed, so much to digest you want to pause the disc and investigate every detail. Blatantly Blade Runner-ish, more of the film should have taken place here as is often described in the EU canon.

Our first glimpse of Palpatine's subtle cultivation of Mannakin's Death Star sized ego, planting black seeds for the conversion to come.

The silent majesty of the Jedi Library, too-briefly glimpsed but obviously somber and august as befits a noble order, with marble busts of previous masters adorning the stacks and arrogant librarians patrolling the aisles. There's so much room to explore the rich legacy of these aristocratic warrior-monks that it's a shame Lucas hardly went there; all we got were scraps like this.

The map-reader light show in the Jedi temple with innocent eyes watching twirling holo-planets dance mid-air, adorably decked out in too big helmets that weigh down their little heads. Scored with a low wordless choir that underlines the youngling's innocence, it's a slight respite of celestial beauty unfortunately trampled underfoot by the senile CGI stump-frog's ever-more irritating backward cadence.

The constant downpour of Kamino, especially during Obi-Wan's stand off with Jango where puddles drench poor Ben in his wire-drag round the launching pad or when making contact with the Jedi council through ship radio ('care of the old folk's home'). A palpable bit of atmosphere that's persistently undermined by the flimsy appearance of the CGI Kaminoans themselves.

The one single dogfight in the movie, made ridiculous by its Sony PlayStation appearance, as well as bratty Boba's backseat driving; the brief interim of silence though before Slave 1's seismic charges detonate on Obi-wan's tail are jarring for not being so.

Mannakin brooding at sunset over the desert wastes, embracing Padme as their silhouettes, poetically painted on the farm-hut entrance, join briefly and the music swells right before lil orphan Annie springs into action, speeder bike racing through the dune sea as Tatooine's twin suns frame his frantic quest to save mommy. The previous prequel's signature theme ( Duel of the Fates) briefly adds a vibe of gravitas when Gayden's hollow glare cannot. Moody.

Mannakin slaughtering the Tuskens, another moment of grit deflating cgi sheen before the backward talking Muppet returns everything to steadfast fakery. Mannakin pulling into the homestead next morning too, hauling mom's corpse in another wonderfully grim moment. He really does look like a psychopath here and again it's wordless. Finally Mannikin's confession, which plays more like a spoiled child's temper tantrum with tweenage-cute Gayden shedding a crocodile tear for the camera. Still, the subtle Sith music and Mannakin's initial 'I'm a big boy now!' pride at ruthlessly murdering babies isn't exactly something to snicker off.

Chris Lee, the flip-side of Peter Cushing and yet another slumming Brit to add that dash of pedigree to a silly space opera.

The arena fight which brings a slumbering film to vibrant life. First with a gladiatorial face-off against three different species, all in Ray Harryhausen tradition (pause to observe Nute Gunray chortling with delight when Padme gets clawed- nice) than with the all-out battle droid VS Jedi horde vs. Republic gunships round 2, the kind of Jedi-in-numbers-and-in-their-prime all out bonanza fan boys have been waiting for. It's a blur of cascading laser-swords and criss-crossing blaster-bolts, rising in a thrilling crescendo as the conflict erupts into planetary war (pause to observe young Boba, raising dead daddy's helmet to his face, all but vowing out loud to follow in his footsteps- nice).The shaky cam imitating battlefront verisimilitude, zooming in on hulking dreadnoughts and massing troop movements, kicking up blizzards of sand as the air becomes indecipherable with blaster-bolts- all sadly undermined by weightless video game graphics. Just one question: why are all Jedi light sabers limited to two colors unless you're evil or Sam Jackson? Round 3: the final light saber duel, uninspired compared to the fluid ballet of the previous three-way in PHANTOM MENACE yet still including another of those too brief grace mo-ments. The hanger bay lights extinguish with just the glowing blades left to illuminate the cavernous dwelling, poised cool blue and the simmer hot red, Jedi & Sith. Yet again, Kermit arrives to undo the scene's small dignity, moronically leap-frogging about to totally suck the cool mystique from a cherished character.

Lastly, the musical montage than ends every STAR WARS film though only one part of it here. The concluding matrimonial smooch between Mannikin and his mommy stand-in is tepid and gross but the first appearance of the fascist super anthem Imperial March in the prequel trilogy played over massing clone troops, ready to spread death and destruction across the galaxy causes tingles every time (pause to observe Bail Organa's sigh of defeat, impotently shaking a hand as senators oversee the war effort from a privileged distance: nice).

Human moments in an inhuman movie.

Considering the presence of Mcdowell, the dreamy incoherence brought brutally back to earth with XXX & violence, the historical/ahistorical milieu -this could be one Alex Delarge's pornographic daydreams, explored in epic length!

'Caligula' is the cum stained comedy of a vain child elevated to the status of a god walking the earth, a petty deity without the inner resources to make his reign anything but one of terror & suffering, leaving his subjects no choice but to rise up & dethrone him...

Truly the height of porn-chic, the credit sequence is scarlet typeface on black with portentous choral backdrop readying viewers for the atavistic charnel house to come, but not before that trademark coin-face, the one with bleeding eyes overlaid with Prokofiev's Dance of the Knights, bouncy & sly like our Little boots (while everything else here is fair game, the general consensus rightly holds the score beyond reproach).

Plainly aping fellow freak-show Satyricon, Caligula too taps Fellini's sci-fi past instead of Gore Vidal's preferred straight verisimilitude. This is an idea of pagan Rome,a fragmented dream-world loosely based on fact with unreal tangents sprinkled liberally in between fornication, bloodshed & bureaucracy, presided over by our stunted man-child.The shoddy camp chintz scenery establishes a sickly-sweet air,overripe & too bright & just plain off, Flash Gorden meets John Waters,a fetid atmosphere where vipers thrive. It feels like a squalid imitation of something real, right down to the plywood marble columns, cheap & luxurious at once.Everyone's playing dress-up here, children in costume."It doesn't matter" exclaims Caligula at one point. "Its only a show!" Plethoras of naked slave bodies melt into a neon pornotopia decor, denied any individuality outside of objectification, used & discarded at will. The entire ruling class of Rome show such a callous indifference to humanity in fact, removed from it by virtue of position, that scene after scene of vile cruelty is constantly enacted: sliced c*cks & fisted men, giant baroque beheading machines, lesbian golden showers & hermaphroditic penetration - the swine must be shown a firm hand at all times.

The grotto scenes offer the most succinct vision for what the filmmakers were going for but which is sadly not sustained through-out. Like entering one of Dante's circles of hell complete with billowing smoke, its an underworld of writhing bodies, torture devices & disembodied screams with roman aristocrats leisurely strolling round discussing the naked art of power (every now & then the Caligula that might've been pops up between the cracks like this).The best performance isn't Mcdowell doing his spoiled-child-from-hell shtick though. Peter O'Toole's loathsome emperor Tiberius easily steals the show, sinking into a pit of self immolating depravity in his final years, literally rotting from within while spitting out words lest he choke on them. Only a lapsed idealist spews this much venom and in Tiberius we see the last vestiges of a great republic before its down-slide into an iron clad boot heel. Caligula has no such context- he's a sheltered uncivilized youth. His cruelty is weightless & banal, a product of boredom. He never had a soul to sell, the opening biblical quote belongs more to the old man Tiberius, a once-goody whittled down into a self-loathing, sadistic monster that O'Toole sells with every bit of scenery he chews. When he goes the spirit of his island fortress goes, deprived of its black animating force. I wish the whole film had been about this guy.

Caligula paints a candy coloured burlesque of power, ostentatious pageantry hiding a dreadfully empty centre. Everyone wants power here & will gladly murder for it, hollow cut-outs playing human on the stage of the imperial court. Little Boots wants & gets but only because he has nothing else to do besides fondle his sister.This is no tragedy, he's an empty vessel. Once he's crowned he's clearly at a loss how to use his power beyond masturbatory ends, leading a lazy life of cruel hedonism like Peter Pan with the world's greatest train-set. All too quickly we witness the boredom, the frustration, the spiritual emptiness of unlimited power & what it would be like to truly never grow up. Its like that episode of the Twilight Zone where the crook thinks he's in heaven and gets everything he ever wanted, only to find its actually hell he resides in.

The final shot really pounds home the arbitrariness of this charade- one minute orgies in the sun, the next your guts pooled in a gooey mass round your sandals, wondering where it all went south. Ba da boom. Significant too, the idyllic grace before the killing shot, rising to a beautiful crescendo as the state eats another of its own, complete with kiddie slaughter & be-headings. Caligula sees whats coming & naturally embraces it, death being the only rush left. It all happens so fast as to be an afterthought too; just as Caligula & co. hit the ground their entire retinue disperse, the assassins moved onto more important duties while the help quickly rinses the blood off the furniture lest it stain. Ouch- the rat race goes on. There wasn't any other way for the movie to end, really: an upside down, bloodied Gaius staring freeze-framed into the lens as credits crawl up his corpse- It's nihilistically note- perfect & kind of beautiful.

The Apollonian I Claudius dealt with its politics in a rational, Masterpiece Theater way, while Caligula the low-brow Dionysian flip-side, revels in the mud like its drooling idiot brother, laughing away those airs of grandeur & rubbing our faces in nothing *but* the p*ss, the sh*t, the vomit, cum & other fallout of those same politics. Uninhibited new guard meeting high-dignity artifice old- I don't see how it could've ever achieved the mainstream recognition it clearly pines for, thank Jupiter. Its failed obsession with respectability, with being a contender inverts it into a hideous three-ring circus instead, a farce.Priceless

The tale of the Count, that icon of horror and grandfather to all modern bloodsuckers is so well known that reciting the plot of Bram Stoker's novel is like regurgitating history. The undead Hungarian that so many associate with flowing capes, decaying European aristocracy & butchered Slavic accents is such a staple of pop culture that the terror of the original concept- a tortured nobleman who just want to purchase a little real estate for Christ's sake- has lost a lot of its power. Look no further than the rhyming vamp on Sesame St. to see how tired this is. It's only natural something so resonant and rich is relentlessly plundered and duplicated though. Once upon a time the arbitrary vivisection of oversexed teenagers at the hands of a masked madman was cause for gasps, not ironic winking.

It takes talent to bring new perspectives to dated material and even as early as 1979 the Count was looking long in tooth. It took German director Werner Herzog to restore the mythos with the sense of dignity it once commanded, a re-invention of the silent B&W classic NOSFERATU, itself an unofficial adaption of the book. That film was a catalogue of indelible images in its own right, orchestrated by silent film pioneer F.W. Murnau. Is there a more memorable image in all of horror filmdom than Count 'Orlock' climbing a dark stairway, distinctive silhouette vividly imprinted on the retina of your mind's eye, all grasping claws and hunched back like some creepy-crawly unleashed from our deepest, darkest nightmares? Herzog is too respectful to try a retread though, this is more homage than shot-by-shot remake, reminding us of its debt to its sire while forging its own unique signature.

NOSFERATU '79 is a direct antithesis to all the over-cut, MTV emo-youth vamp flicks. Its so damned uncommercial most would lack the patience to see it through. That'd be a shame because she's such a monument of unease, a tribute to disquiet so methodical in pacing and detail that you aren't even aware of being under its peculiar spell until its long over and you have time to ponder the fever dream just witnessed.

Even the opening credits are some of the creepiest ever, lingering hand-held shots of mummified corpses leaning on a cave wall, all toothy grins & beef jerky flesh, the music swelling in a wordless choral hymn (the sublime Popul Vuh). No explanation is offered for this opener, let your imagination fill in the blanks. Again & again the film works like this, especially Harker's (Bruno Ganz) wordless, lonely trek through the Borgo pass, transversing river & mountainside as more ominous sounds plug away, amounting to almost 10 minutes of running time in which virtually nothing happens except that delicious sense of building menace. Leaving behind familiar stomping grounds for something arcane and off limits.... Once you get into movie's groove, this stuff actually feels too brief. Those not bored out of their skulls will be panting for more of the nightmare travelogue.

When the titular character finally graces the screen, it's almost disappointing. A big plus that Klaus Kinski's Count is a captivating one; a creature that comes off more pathetic & weary than malevolent, his wretched, rat-like visage contradicting the suave sinister nobleman and plastic GQ model teenagers we've come to expect lately. Every line uttered by Herzog's temperamental muse sounds like its coming from a century's distance, as if even speaking now is an effort for the Count. Just like Ann Rice did, NOSFERATU groks true immortality as anything but a gift, closer to a one way ticket to a padded cell. Most vamp movies revel in some sort of undead, 'live fast die young leave a pretty corpse' chic (a huge effigy of Jim Morrison in THE LOST BOYS in fact captures this mentality of debased worship perfectly). Here our resident bloodsucker prances about like a one-man tragedy. Living forever is a bitch, no bones about it: ageless freak hood in a world of shadows & ashes where everything burns but you? Alienation doesn't begin to describe it.

What little dialogue there is functions like background noise, failing to propel like the images do. Other than Dracula there's nary a memorable line to be had, the chatter is perfunctory and distanced. Everyone here is like ghosts to start; this version too could function without speech, just imagery & music to carry you along its dark waters, the actors relying on exaggerated movements to convey emotion. Herzog exploits modern techniques like sound & color whilst still hearkening back to a low-fi past in honor of the original. It results in real poetry (if you can stomach restraint verging on vice-like). Without having to scrutinize the plot though the you're in a better position to admire the subtle, dream-like atmosphere conjured without keeping up with story.

The empty cargo ship dispensing armies of vermin, the funeral progression of plague struck Wismar, the last supper held in the city square as thousands of rats congregate between the diner's feet- you could watch the German language version & be no less captivated. The language of fear is universal.

Visually stunning but maddening, The Church is a definite curio in the later entries of Italian horror. This is a case of the parts being stronger than the whole. But what parts they are....

The fantastic opening with Teutonic Knights slaughtering men women and children is beautiful and horrific, the barbarity of the Christian crusaders particularly emphasized by a focus on a child's decapitated head, lingered on while being kicked around by mighty devil steeds as they go about their holy handiwork. The carcasses are then lugged into a pit and buried, a priest proclaiming the need of God's house to be built upon the spoiled earth to contain some vague connotations of ultimate evil that aren't elaborated on until said evil is let loose by a librarian centuries on to run amok, claiming more annoying 80's characters in standard messy methods. (The crotchety old Monsignor's answer to this anarchy? Why, let the virus run free and cleanse our corrupt planet of ALL sinners- PRAISE HIM!). All of this in wild, wacky camera movements & menacing angles galore.

Originally conceived as the 3rd installment of Bava's brainless but exhilarating Demons series, Michael Soavi brings his nuanced eye to The Church. It s got more style, more atmosphere & more high mindedness than Bava's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink saga. Soavi's background as the son of painter and protégé to master Argento (who also contributed to the screenplay) is obvious in the elaborate compositions and arty flourishes which unfortunately still can't elevate the weak script & lack of focus, other than as a big dig at Catholicism's overflowing closet of skeletons (which is also nice). In this way the film succeeds, hoisting an original clothesline for some neat set-pieces that don't always rely on gore but instead evocative atmosphere; the church's past deeds literally back to haunt future generations. Also, Soavi's more subtle treatment of evil contagion works better than Bava's rampaging, puss spewing plague. Perhaps a *little* more emphasis towards the ick factor would've have been nice though, Soavi could've had his cake and eaten it to (also check out the primo prog band of Italian horror themselves, Goblin, who supply the tunes.)

** Lucio Fulci was renowned for his gore-soaked, entrail-laden spaghetti epics, held in particular regard by some of us, accustomed to watered- down, assembly line slashers and their endless line of sequels as the totality of the horror flick experience. Dreamy and incoherent as well as repulsive & palpable, Lucio's movies are an acquired taste. To accuse him of being liberal with narrative is putting it lightly. In the world according to the maestro, insane strokes of bad luck strike with the disfavor of a sadistic god; guard dogs rip your throat out, cellar walls collapse onto hell-mouths, and jealous father's power drill craniums with demented glee. It's a mad, mad world of grisly freak accidents, usually of the supernatural variety & mankind is little more than playthings. Such a uniformed unconformity to the strictures of plot and even common sense have been used as ammunition for criticisms, but I find his wacky gutter-surrealism charming. I've had enough cookie cutter story lines and half baked scare tactics to last a lifetime. Unpredictability & restraint will never be an issue with a Fulci film and we should be glad. House of Clocks is like this. Three thugs decide to rob an elderly couple's estate and end up murdering the occupants when it all goes haywire. However, when the hundreds of clocks adorning the mansion begin running backwards, time itself begins to unravel and the victims return to life, turning the tables on their accosters with interesting results.

Logic is conservatively adhered to throughout this scattershot tale, and Fulci has his usual schlock gore on hand to spice it up, though not nearly at the strength of his earlier classics, sadly. Though clearly upper tier output from his awful final phase, the inspired nihilistic vision of the early 80's just isn't there. Unfortunately too, the photography has a hazy indistinctness which apparently is a trademark of his later work, but that's small potatoes compared to the horrible dubbing which saddles the actors with ill-suited voices (like a lot of Italian genre movies) that over and under accentuate sentences constantly and sound like parodies of their respective characters.

The real delight of this bizarre little ditty is the elderly duo, presented as polite, thoroughly insane geriatrics. These are your kindly grandparents filtered through the Italian sleaze ethic: upon graciously accepting the resignation of their maid, the old lady casually picks up a wooden pole and impales the woman, twisting with glee and watching her intestines un-loop .She then tosses off her gardening gloves and sashays out of the greenhouse(!?). Such throwaway moments of off-the-wall tastelessness (the screen writer also penned House on the Edge of the Park) ensure House of Clocks is, if you can stomach the slow-pacing, a decent time killer. But there are no earth shattering gore operatics here.