Dearest friends, it is I, the Duke of DVD, once more entering into sexual congress with all that is MAD in cinema, an unholy coupling that will spawn wretched, unnameable things best put down with alacrity, lest they grow in power and finally destroy the world in a black tempest of wanton deviancy. I have traveled far and wide, my dearest subjects, and delved into many a’ forgotten hole, in order to mine the choicest of stinky nuggets for your cinematic pleasure.
From the top of Bihor Massif in the west Carpathian Mountains, to the lowest valleys of forgotten islands in the South Pacific, I’ve searched. I’ve made profane trades with entities whose names I cannot commit to this page, in exchange for the best of the worst, the sort of movies that burrow under your flesh and deposit night-black eggs, which gestate unknown to you, until such time as you are devoured from within, your eyes becoming black orbs as your tongue swells, your sphincter loosens, and blackened blood pours from your gaping mouth.
I do this, my friends, so that you don’t have to. So that you may sit in your mud-dobbed hovels, a sheep’s-dung fire warming your wizened, twisted hands as you gulp down the few spoonfuls of watery gruel that serve as your only meal that day. Knowing that a glimpse of my written word is the only thing sustaining your will to live, I take it as a sacred duty to risk life and limb in order to procure movies to watch that no mere human is capable of. What monstrosity do I have for you today?
Journey with me, let us find out... (MORE MADNESS)
Friday, April 29, 2011
DVD Review: There's Nothing Out There! (1992)
Monday, May 24, 2010
Super Soul Brother (1979): or, Wildman Steve is Wild, Man
Sometime back I reviewed a home-grown blaxploitation flick/folk art cinema entitled The Guy From Harlem (1977), which chronicled the exploits of P.I./Kung Fu Master/International Security Contractor Al Connors. (Read that review here, if you know what's good for you!) While not by any stretch an accomplished piece of filmmaking, The Guy from Harlem was not without its peculiar charms, one of which was a scene-stealing turn in a supporting role by one Steve Gallon as local crime lord Harry Dubaul, who enlists Connors' aid against the more powerful and eeeviler crime boss Big Daddy. Charismatic, profane, and absolutely irrepressible, Gallon made such an impression that I quickly scampered to his imdb page to find out where I could see more of his idiosyncratic dramatic stylings.
As it turns out, despite a 40-year career as a DJ, media personality, stand-up comic and recording artist under the stage name "Wildman Steve" (according to this affectionate if sparse tribute site, Gallon was "the first black comedian to chart on Cash Box and the first to sell a million records"), he only appeared in front of the camera in three films: the aforementioned Guy from Harlem, the legendary Rudy Ray Moore vehicle Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law, and the movie under discussion today, Super Soul Brother, aka The Six-Thousand Dollar Nigger.* Released in 1979 and directed by Rene Martinez Jr., who also helmed The Guy from Harlem, Super Soul Brother is Gallon's only starring role, and clearly designed as a showcase for his bombastic comedic talents.
*Don't blame me, folks--I didn't come up with the title.
We Are the Untamed
Alas, the course of SCIENCE never did run smooth, and while the serum does what it says on the tin, it also has a rather unfortunate side effect: exactly seven days after being injected, every super-powered lab rat in the trial group has invariably dropped dead. While Dr. Dippy and his comely research assistant Peggy (Joycelyn Norris) keep working to find "the neutralizer" (apparently through test-tube mixing trial-and-error), Jim and Bob grow impatient to see a return on their $6000 investment. Unwilling to take the shot themselves and trust the diminutive doc to save them in time, they decide to recruit "a wino out the ghett-o!" to be their short-lived strong man.
Dr. Dippy: Giant of SCIENCE
Of course their unwitting guinea pig is Wildman Steve (Gallon), a down-and-out homeless drunk prone to mouthing off to other hobos and getting beat up by wandering gangs of toughs. When Bob picks him up and promises him an apartment, money, and all the food he can eat, Steve is too astonished to say no. He's taken back to Dr. Dippy's lab, examined by Peggy, and told to rest up and get healthy for the upcoming experiment.
As in The Guy from Harlem, each scene in Super Soul Brother seems mostly improvised around
a central idea, be it exposition about the serum, details of the heist plans, or the preliminary examination of the subject. However, here the supporting characters' dialogue serves the dual purpose of bookending Steve Gallon's frenetic physical comedy and shameless stereotype baiting. It's nothing short of astounding: Wildman Steve makes Mantan Moreland (King of the Zombies) look like Morgan Freeman. Add the fact that Gallon seems to have only two comedic settings--Full-Bore Insanity and Unconsciousness--and you've got a one-way ticket to Over-the-Over-the-Top Town.
A. Taste.
Incredibly, it just gets worse from there. Given his own apartment by his benefactors (the same apartment Al Connors used in The Guy from Harlem--I'd know that orange shag carpet anywhere!), Steve is further treated to the services of lady-of-the-evening Addie Williams, who says she's there to do "anything he wants." He responds by having her cook him dinner (hilarious?) and then by requesting something special he remembers from his childhood, when his mother would put him in the bath and give him a good "butt-washin'!" After this joke is exhausted (it takes a while), he tells the girl, "Before I got down on my luck, I was a playa! I used to make my money making love to WHITE WOMEN!" He then opens his robe to show her his equipment, which is apparently just as impressive as the stereotype would have us believe.
Not the reaction he was hoping for.
His later seduction of virginal Peggy is even less restrained from a comedic standpoint, as he literally jumps up and down with excitement over "gettin' that cherry!" Later, he amazes her with his formidable lovemaking skills. Sample dialogue:
"Don't hurt me, Steve, don't hurt me! That ring on your finger!"
"That ain't no ring on my finger, baby...that's the watch on my wrist!"
As expected, Steve Gallon does almost all of the comedic heavy lifting in the movie, though we do get a couple of borderline surreal interludes with Dr. Dippy and his lover, the Amazonian burlesque-girl-gone-to-seed, Monica (Wild Savage--seriously), who refuses to sleep with the Doc until he buys her the diamond pasties he promised her. Instead the two exchange backrubs and play chess, with Dr. Dippy all the while dressed like a middle-aged female spa-goer. Get ready for a sight you can't un-see:
Check and Mate
The rest of the movie is basically a series of vignettes constructed to give Gallon the opportunity to get as wild as he wants to be, which is plenty wild, believe me. Eventually he's given the injection, leading to more jumping and wide-eyed face-pulling ("Is he a monster? Is he a wildman? Is the n*gger crazy?" Bob helpfully narrates), gets his revenge on the gang that roughed him up, and out of gratitude to his new friends agrees to play a "practical joke" on the jewelry store clerks by walking out with the safe (under cover of a bizarre diversion courtesy Dr. Dippy and Monica). The effects here are as low-rent as possible (a cardboard safe that doesn't even budge the car into which it's loaded), and the fight scenes are choreographed with less skill than a backyard wrestling tournament. (The fights in The Guy from Harlem are spectacular by comparison.) Of course the silly but good-hearted Soul Brother eventually tumbles to his friends' nefarious schemes, and with Peggy's help tries to stop them and find the neutralizer before he's another dead superhero.
It's a maxim that there can be too much of a good thing, and in comedy this is doubly true, it seems to me. Limited to five minutes of screen time in The Guy from Harlem, with a specific role to play and certain dramatic strictures in which to work, Gallon showed himself a memorable, scene-stealing screen presence, a shining light in the otherwise dim-bulb cast. He obviously needed those constraints, because without them, he's really too much to take. (Think the difference between Jim Carrey's performances in Earth Girls are Easy and in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Then amplify that difference and add race humor.) Though Gallon does manage to wring a few laughs out with sheer energy and ebullience, most of the time he's so far over the top he's absolutely impossible to connect to.
Unfortunately for Bob, his trigger finger was not only itchy, but ticklish.
The rest of the cast are mostly forgettable, and unsurprisingly many have only this movie in their acting credits. A notable exception is Peter Conrad as Dr. Dippy, who went on to assay such roles as "Midget with Lady" in Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse, "Midget" in Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, and "Mule Train Driver" and "Sandy's MC" in Porky's and Porky's II: The Next Day. Conrad is no Peter Dinklage, but at least his chronic bed-head hairstyle and atrocious German accent add a little texture to the character.
As for the direction, it seems Rene Martinez Jr. had his best work behind him at this point (i.e., The Guy from Harlem, faint praise as that may be). The pacing is terrible, though to be fair if we shortened Gallon's comedy bits to manageable lengths and focused on the plot, the movie would likely be 30 minutes long. The script clearly never got beyond outline form ("Say something about Steve needing to get some rest. Let Steve go for a while. Cut to..."), and most scenes are filmed from a static mid-range shot that does nobody any favors. The whole thing is even more amateurish than Martinez's other flick, and lacks that film's sense of energy and purpose. And yes, of course there's a boom mike cameo.
It's a little blurry, but it's up there.
After watching Super Soul Brother, I still like Wildman Steve, but I'm more acutely aware of his dramatic limitations--more perhaps than either he or his director were. As a supporting character he's a stick of comedic dynamite. However, strap a movie to his back, and what you've got is a bomb. (See what I did there?) If you like dwarfs, mad scientists, pre-PC race humor, and a good ol' fashioned butt-washin', I'm still not sure I'd recommend watching Super Soul Brother. It's not surprising that the promised sequel (we fade out on Gallon in a t-shirt that reads, "This N*gger is Coming Back!") never materialized. Though I certainly wish Gallon had done more character work before his death in 2004, I still must sadly give his sole starring effort a paltry 1 Thumb. He deserved better--but then again, so did the audience.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Gargoyles (1972): or, Goyles Gone Wild!
The story is well-known: a long, long time ago--around six thousand years, according to the most reputable theological calculations--the archangel Lucifer, flush with devilish pride, rebelled against God and as a result was cast out of Heaven, taking with him a large number of similarly prideful angels. Ever since then, the Light Bearer has waged a war of revenge on God's favored creatures, Humankind, variably seeking either to lure them into iniquity and Hell after death, or else to destroy them completely and establish his infernal kingdom on Earth.
A lesser-known aspect of the story is presented in the opening credits of the made-for-TV movie Gargoyles: while viewing a Pernicious Powerpoint Presentation of devil-centered art through the centuries (paintings by Bosch and Blake, medieval woodcuts, stills from the 1922 silent classic Häxan), a Narrator informs us how Satan also branched out into the creation business himself, fathering a race of demonic humanoids for a predictably eeevil purpose:
[The Devil said,] "My offspring the gargoyles will one day rule the Lord's works, Earth and Man!" And so...while man ruled on earth, the gargoyles waited, lurking, hidden from the light. Reborn every 600 years in Man's reckoning of time, the gargoyles joined battle against man to gain dominion over the earth...
Obviously the Satan Spawn were really bad at this, since by this man's reckoning their first 10 or so attempts must have ended in abject failure. Still, in 1972, in the southern California desert, that time had apparently rolled around once again...
Not a Gargoyle. Probably.
We open with divorced professor Mercer Boley (Cornel Wilde) picking up his adult daughter Diana (Jennifer Salt) at the airport. The professor has apparently written a series of best-selling books about how religion is a load of bunk--much like Richard Moll's character in the recently reviewed The Nightmare Never Ends--and has recruited his daughter to take photos for his next book, 5000 Years of Demonology. As the Richard Dawkins of his day, Professor Boley doesn't believe in the supernatural, and hopes to show how man's conception of evil beings through the ages has really just been the result of ignorance, superstition, and one too many bowls of pre-sleepytime gruel.
On their way to Mexico for research, the pair stop at Uncle Willie's Desert Museum, a dust-covered roadside attraction whose owner claims to have found a valuable supernatural artifact. Crusty old Uncle Willie (Woody Chambliss) first comes off as a charlatan, but when the prof threatens to bolt he takes them out the the shed to show them what he's uncovered: the skeleton of a demonic humanoid beast, with horns, wings, and a saurian beak!
"I call it, 'Floopsy.'"
On the run from the monsters, Mercer and Diana hole up in a local motel run by drunk dowager Mrs. Parks (the scene-stealing Grayson Hall). A pair of wingless gargoyles who look like the offspring of Lou Gossett and a Sleestak invade the Boleys ' room and grab the skull, but when one of them is struck on the highway by a passing semi (that keeps right on truckin', despite having just creamed a freakin' dinosaur-man!), the professor scoops up the body and throws it in his station wagon, hoping to get it back to L.A. in time for the next taping of That's Incredible!--which will be about 8 years later. Unfortunately this brings out the King Gargoyle (Bernie Casey), a winged nightmare who seems less interested in reclaiming his fallen subject's body than in staking a new claim on Diana's--emphasis on "stake."
"Please, just try to relax."
After some shenanigans, rigmarole, and assorted brouhaha, King G kidnaps Diana, taking her back to the Gargoyle HQ where a dozen other scaly horrors are tending to an Alien-style cache of eggs in preparation for exponential reproduction and the eradication of humanity. While Professor Mercer, the local police, and a group of recreational dirt-bike enthusiasts (led by a stonier-than-usual Scott Glenn) comb the desert and engage in periodic skirmishes with the wingless drones (only the winged gargoyles are "breeders"), the head gargoyle forces Diana to read to him from her father's books, passages about medieval women being raped by incubi. Of course this makes King G horny--well, hornier--and he starts putting the moves on his new little pink-skinned petunia. Unfortunately this puts him on the outs with his Muppet-reject winged old lady, whose jealousy leads her to allow the humans into the cave and sets up the final confrontation and another 600 years of thinking about what could have been.
Man, they just don't make TV movies like they used to!
Gargoyles is a fun movie from start to finish, helped along by very brisk pacing (the first gargoyle attack comes IMMEDIATELY after the first commercial break), some periodically excellent cinematography, a 60s monster movie-style score, and Emmy-winning monster make-up from Ellis Burman Jr. and future FX legend Stan Winston. While the man-in-a-suit aesthetic might seem a little cheesy to an audience weaned on ever more photorealistic CG creatures, there's a reason a whole generation was moved to nightmare by these guys:
"Did you know your Stretch Armstrong doll is under here?"
Miss Gargoyle New Mexico, 1971
Don't Break the Oath
"Check under the hood, please."
"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. Franzetta."
"This isn't a cookbook...it's a sex manual!"
Director Bill L. Norton delivers a mixed bag from behind the camera. On the plus side, he does a good job keeping the gargoyles in shadow for much of the first act, adding to the menace and suspense while still showing them to be dangerous, frightening monsters. However, his penchant for showing the creatures only in slow-motion, even during battles with humans (sometimes on moving cars!) loses its effectiveness very quickly. He does manage some gorgeous compositions with the desert landscape, at times evoking an epic, huge-budget feel:
Vanishing Point
Storm's a-brewin'
No Country for Scaly Men
But at other times he produces some pretty tremendous gaffes--whether due to tight shooting schedules, inability to afford retakes, or basic sloppiness is unclear. Check out the shadows of the crew in the following snaps:
At least there's no lens flare
Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Director
There are perhaps a few other quibbles one could make--a cop car/dirt bike chase goes on a bit too long for my taste, for instance, and the Gargoyle Women somehow manage to lay eggs that are about 5 times the size of any conceivable aperture on their persons--but weighed against the entertainment value Gargoyles provides, they are small ones indeed. 2.75 thumbs for this piece of made-for-TV excellence.
Still yet MORE images from Gargoyles (1972):
Gargoyles Go Wild
Monster in the Bed
Toughest thing about being an elderly sheriff? Depends.
Reading is Sexy
"This way to Burning Man!"
Road Rash
"Get on my horse. My horse is amazing."
Keep watching the skies! Or the boobs. Either's good.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Mommy's Epitaph (1987): Or When The Cougar Prowls, The Rat Eats Well
Greetings and salutations, friends! Once more the skies blacken, dogs scurry with tucked tails through filthy alleys, the very young and very old cry without cause, and war crows from the Hinterlands gorge themselves on the fleshy eyes of mine enemies. That's right, the Duke of DVD is back once again to hold you face-down in the over-full bucket of cinematic offal, ignoring your futile thrashing until your movements subside, your legs weakly jerking as you finally give over to the awesome. As most of you, my loyal readers, know, I have been on a Mario Bava kick of late. Working away in subterranean dungeons, my brow furrowed in concentration, the cacophony of tortured moans echoing through the blackened halls, I labor with love, crafting these reviews for you so that you may enjoy one small slice of heaven before the weight of the world crushes your pitiful souls.
One cannot live by cake alone, however. Sometimes we must cast off the trappings of film royalty and delve into the chamberpot of the silver screen, picking up and examining choice nuggets, letting their odour fill our senses, perhaps touching the tip of our tongues to their surface to fully discern what makes them great. I speak, of course, of Troma; that shambling corpse of a movie studio that takes the term "shoestring", bends it over a rotting sofa, then rapes it repeatedly and messily. A cleansing of the palette is sometimes needed, and Troma serves this purpose like no other.
What festering abortion awaits us this time? Let us explore, shall we?
Mommy's Epitaph appears to have been filmed over a dull weekend by some hardcore Troma-ites who knew they had something special on their hands, and just went for it. It is the very definition of The Manifesto, and as you will see, brings the goods with gusto and verve. Our movie opens with a family arriving at their new digs. We have Forrest (Jimmy Williams), the doting father, and Martha (Delores Nascar(!)) the cougar in heat. Along with them we have Amy (Natasha Pavlovich) the 16 year old daughter, and the aged grandmother Virginia (Liz Kane). It seems the daughter is fairly unhappy with the family having to move and is worried about making new friends, etc. We cut to the next day as daddy drives her to school.
"Isn't it beautiful honey, our own private Idaho. Complete with plenty of backyard corpse burial room!"
Soon a painter arrives, having been hired by Martha to paint some of the bedrooms. It seems that Martha has an insatiable appetite for the menfolk. She wastes no time in slipping into a skimpy negligee and attempting to seduce the unsuspecting painter guy. Mr. Painter is having none of it, though, and rebuffs her efforts. She immediately gets furious and runs out of the room, returning moments later armed with a large kitchen knife! She repeatedly stabs the painter in the back before he turns around, slumping against the wall. A few more stabs to the chest and he's nearly done for, sliding down the wall with a look of horror on his face, but Martha isn't done, oh no!
"I wanted you to use paint on my walls, not blood, you heathen!"
Now, friends, up until this point in the film, I was fairly bored. Nothing much was happening, and my attention was slipping. The brutal stabbing was waking me up, but I wasn't impressed until, as the painter's body was sliding down the wall, Martha fucking slaps his face, leaving a bloody hand-print! That, my friends, is brilliance! A little coup de grace that punctuates any brutal stabbing. Now I was interested to see where things were going, and the film didn't let me down!
Next up we see poor Forest digging a shallow grave out in the back yard and burying the hapless painter. It seems he has had to cover up for his wife's murderous tendencies before, and has come to peace with the fact that he's married to a psychopath that he still loves and cares about. It also helps matters that Martha polishes his scepter after he showers off from his labors in the backyard. A little knob-gobbling goes a long way towards men accepting the fact that their significant other is a murdering cunt.
"Remember honey, you said that the next time you killed that I'd get to go in through the backdoor..."
The next day at school, Amy meets Wayne, a studly, bouffant-haired gump who excels at sports and general douchebaggery. It doesn't take a super genius to recognize he's cougar bait in waiting. Meanwhile, Forrest goes to see a local psychiatrist by the name of Shirley. He's going for his wife's sake, he tells her, and spouts out what will be the first of several awesome lines of dialogue in the movie: "You gotta help my wife, doc. See, she's got this thing for nightgowns..." The doc says she'll try to help but that she needs to see Martha to do so. Later that night, Amy is getting ready for bed when suddenly a filthy, bloodied man runs into her room and mumbles incoherently at her before running off. Screaming for help, Amy freaks as both her grandma and dad try to console her, saying she must have imagined it. That's when they notice the bloody hand-print on her shoulder!
"How in the blue fuck did you get your period on your shoulder?!"
It seems Mr. Painter wasn't quite as dead as we all previously thought, despite being stabbed multiple times in the back and chest (not to mention slapped and buried!). Forrest goes out to check the grave (which the painter took the time to fill back in after his exit). While kneeling over to check, the painter hacks him in the back with a pick axe! Poor Forrest, que lastima!
"Picky picky."
Out for more revenge, our heroic painter heads back into the house. Searching from room to room, he is confronted by Martha. Here we have some more awesome lines of dialogue, it plays out like this:
Martha: "I knew you couldn't stay away! I figured you would suffocate in the grave. God, you stink! Did the dog piss on you?"
Painter: "You BITCH!"
"Ugh, this is worse than those double-stuffed burritos I had last night!"
Then she pulls out a double barrel and blows out his stomach, launching him out the 2nd story window! Martha coolly walks over to the window and sneers down at his (for real this time) corpse. The three women of the house sit around the kitchen table to decide what to do. Amy wants a funeral for her dearly departed father, but Martha tells them all that this is out of the question, because the authorities would be notified. They instead opt for an in-house funeral, complete with black dresses and lots of candles. Dear old dad is laid out in his best suit on a bed. They cry, and Amy screams at her mother that she hates her.
Even brutal murders can be solved by a little family breakfast-time.
Cut to the next morning at breakfast and inexplicably everyone is all smiles. Martha offers to drive Amy to school, which she graciously accepts. Later that day, while Amy is off laughing and flirting like a whore with Wayne at school, Grandma and Martha are sitting out on the back porch of their house having cocktails. Out of nowhere, the good Doctor Shirley shows up. Pretending she's a neighbor welcoming the family to the 'hood, she quickly ingratiates herself with Martha and they become fast friends. We see them walking around the mall shopping, and then enjoying a light lunch. The doc starts gently prying into Martha's psyche, asking pointed questions about Amy and such. When the subject turns to how Amy is growing up and noticing men, Martha flies into a rage.
"So, I hear your mom likes to slobber on men's crotches..."
Things calm down, however, with the most awesome cameo ever. The callow-faced, mulleted visage of Warren (R.W. Munchkin(!!!!)) graces the screen, bidding the doctor hello. It seems he's a patient of the doc's and basically rats her out in front of Martha as being a doctor, which obviously rouses Martha's suspicions. Later the next day, Martha figures out that Dr. Shirley isn't a neighbor at all. Busted!
"Don't mind me, I'll just stand here being awesome."
Meanwhile, Amy and Wayne are planning to elope (taking Amy's grandma with them!). While they are planning naughty things, Shirley goes over to see Martha. Wandering through the dark house calling for her, Shirley is startled by the dog. As she's bending down to pet it, Martha comes out and hits her over the head with a crowbar!
Shirley plans to employ the Tijuana Diet in order to lose weight.
We cut to the basement, where a shirtless (though still wearing a bra) Dr. Shirley is tied up to the rafters, hanging. While she pleads to Martha to let her go, Martha presents a rat. That's right, a rat! It's very much a real live rat as she dangles it over the struggling Shirley. She lets it's front paws grasp and, um, paw at Shirley's exposed flesh before finally presenting us all with her awesome idea: putting the rat in a tin bucket, and then strapping the bucket onto Shirley's bare stomach. Now, this unto itself might be fairly unpleasant, but she goes the extra mile by using a fucking blowtorch to heat up the bucket, causing the heat-crazed rat to tunnel its way out through the path of least resistance! Shirley screams like the damned, which she now is unfortunately. The tunneling rat does its work, and we get a nice effect shot of it leaving a hole somewhere on Shirley's now-dead body.
"Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a, um, cadaver."
Martha heads upstairs and finds Amy packing a suitcase as grandma watches. Furious, she locks Amy in her room. Wayne stops by trying to find Amy, but is rejected by Martha. Meanwhile, Granny knows she needs to get Martha out of the house, even for a little bit, in order to free Amy, so she pours out all of Martha's precious booze. Finding the cupboard bare, Martha heads out in the family truckster to find more. Grandma tries to free Amy but it ain't doin' so she goes to call 911. Before she can speak to anyone, however, Martha returns, not with booze, but with.... wait for it.... an electric knife turkey slicer! She goes to town on poor Granny, hacking and slashing until Grandma is a cooked goose.
Speaking of cooked goose, Wayne returns to rescue Amy. He tries to get some friendly talk going with Martha, playing along as it were. Martha of course tries to seduce him. Seeing that she's not getting anywhere, she leaves the room, finds a bucket, fills it with kerosene, comes back to where Wayne is, and dumps it over his head! She then proceeds to toss lighted matches at him as he dances around the room trying to avoid her. Finally, he sees an opening and lays Martha out with an uppercut to the jaw! He heads upstairs and kicks Amy's door down. They quickly flee the house and get out to the car.
Upon opening the driver's side door, however, Wayne and Amy are shocked to see Martha, who has apparently woken up from being punched out and has hidden in the backseat, just waiting on the couple. She smirks as she tosses a lit match at the unlucky Wayne, who goes up in flames faster than the Vicar's mummified albino walrus he kept around in his study until an errant spark from his fireplace immolated it. Amy screams, Martha laughs as Wayne burns to death.
"I signed up to attend Burning Man, not this!!"
We then see an increasingly tipsy Martha directing Amy to dig yet another grave in the backyard, this one meant for Wayne of course. While her back is turned, however, Amy strikes! She swings the shovel right at Martha's neck.... and it freeze-frames on us. At this point I thought the credits would roll, but oh no! The director has one more card up his sleeve.
We cut to Amy getting into the family car, bags packed. She buckles up and the camera pans around to show that her mother's corpse is sitting in the passenger seat, leaking blood everywhere. Amy has clearly been driven insane as she turns to her mother and has an imaginary conversation about where to next. Setting her sights on Salt Lake City (watch out Utah!), she drives away. Fin.
"Buckle up, ma! Oh, wait... never mind."
So what started out as a boring exercise in being boring turned out to have quite a bit to enjoy about it. Make no mistake, this is a Troma film. At one point a principal character trips over a power cord, looks back at the camera in fright, and then continues the scene. In another, the boom mike is clearly visible hovering over the actor's heads. However, the effects were done well, in particular the rat scene. The stabbings looked real enough, as did the shotgun blast to the stomach that ended the poor painter's day (and life). The acting was somewhat wooden for the most part, but I thought Delores Nascar (that's right, NASCAR) did fairly well, and Natasha Petrovich did well too. Speaking of her, two years after filming Mommy's Epitaph she would compete (and lose) in the Miss America pageant as Miss California. Unfortunately, she doesn't get her boobages out to play, but we can't have everything, now can we?
All in all, it was a budget effort, but a solid one that entertained me once the fireworks started. If it happens to cross your path (not likely, I know), then I suggest you sit back into your overstuffed chair, purse your lips thoughtfully, clutch your snifter of brandy in your claw-like hand, and chuckle with mirth as the Troma goodness washes over you. Mommy's Epitaph earns a solid 2 Thumbs Up from your beloved Duke. Any time you have a film wherein a stabbing victim earns an open-handed slap to the face post-stabbing, well, then, friends... you have something special.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Killer Workout (1986): or, The Power is You, the Power is Me
Sometimes it takes a little bit of time before you know it's for real. Meeting at a friend's Scattergories party, you exchange phone numbers and send a few harmless texts. You agree to meet for coffee, share Cinnabuns and a good conversation. More texts, phone calls, emails, a few movies and a trip to the zoo--then, after a few weeks or even months, you look across the table in the food court in front of Sbarro's, your eyes lock, and you realize it: you're in love.
Other times, the feeling waylays you like a highwayman in a Naschy flick--you catch a glimpse, just the merest twinkling of an eye, the glint of a giant hoop earring, the *zwip* of a spandex bodysuit, the briefest flash of a neon headband, and BAM! You're heels over head over heels again in love.
Maybe it's the fact that I reached puberty and suffered from its ravages for most of the heyday of Wham! and Hall & Oates; maybe it's my taste for the absurd coupled with a love for the athletic and fitness fashions that were haute couture when Reagan was president and Harrison Ford ruled the box office. Whatever the reason, for David A. Prior's 1986 slasher opus Killer Workout (aka Aerobi-cide), I knew right from the start. I love this movie.
I can't fight this feeling anymore
Killer Workout starts off with the requisite flashback bang: a mysterious woman on the eve of signing the contract for a lucrative modeling job (in Paris!) celebrates her good fortune by catching a few rays on the tanning bed, giving the appreciative audience full nekkidity within three minutes of the opening shot. (Are you taking notes, budding young filmmakers of tomorrow? That's TEXTBOOK.) Of course it's the pre-credits sequence, so it comes as no surprise when tragedy strikes--a mechanical malfunction traps her in the UV-bed's deadly embrace, causing the machine to belch smoke and burst into flames like an ungrounded Easy-Bake Oven!
An indeterminate amount of time and an AWESOME credits song later, we find ourselves at the aforementioned gym, where proprietrix Rhonda (Marcia Karr, looking an awful lot like Jo from TV's Facts of Life--which is to say, hawt) is standing in as aerobicize instructor for irresponsible employee Jaimy (Teresa Van der Woude), who is running late, apparently because she couldn't find her cross-trainers--which is the only logical explanation for why she shows up wearing a spandex leotard, leg-warmers, and high-heeled red shoes. (Though when stumbles out of her Porsche and spills a purse-full of condoms onto the asphalt, another possible explanation presents.) Rhonda is a tough, no-nonsense businesswoman, and sets her slatternly subordinate straight: "Business is bad enough already! Just stop showing off your tits and your tight little ass!" Wait, what?
Let's get ready to sweat
It's not long before someone starts killing the gym patrons, just like you probably knew they would, although you likely didn't guess that the murder weapon would be a giant safety pin. Seriously. After a couple of unnamed extras are offed, the LAPD send out Detective Lieutenant Morgan (crater-faced tough guy David James Campbell), who subscribes to the "treat everyone like a suspect and gargle with Dran-o before speaking" school of police work. His presence does nothing to stop the killings, however, and soon the gym is getting a reputation for people not surviving their workouts. Strangely, this does nothing to the attendance level of the aerobicize classes, as every time we see them in session (and we see them a LOT--not that I'm complaining) they seem absolutely packed.
It's easy enough to summarize the plot of Killer Workout, but this is one of those cases where a mere synopsis cannot begin to do justice to the awe-inspiring beauty of the thing itself. This movie is packed so absolutely chock-full of tasty 80s cheese from one end to the other, it really defies logical explanation. From the awesome extended workout footage to the laughably choreographed kung-fu fights to the crimptastic mousse-abusing hairstyles to the good 10-minutes Lt. Morgan spends tracking down and fighting an obvious red-herring, there's just nothing here that fails to put a huge stupid grin on the Vicar's face and fix it there. Add a boom mic cameo and a "cop goes rogue and takes the law in his hands" ending (that ends in complete COP-FAIL), and yes, my friends, it's love.
No pain, no gain, no brain.
2.75 thumbs. And if anyone has a copy of the soundtrack, email me and NAME YOUR PRICE!
Because words fail me, here are a dozen more fantastic images from Killer Workout:
Nice and Brown
"Business is so bad, I had to sell my apostrophe!"
Roid-Fu
Not So Safe
The Queen of Crimp
Just Do It
"Be vewwy quiet..."
The Carradine Club
You'd Wear It
Shadow of the Boom Mic
"But Vicar, I haven't done my stretches!"
Work Them Thangs
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