Meanwhile, outside the building the local police led by Chief Grasso (C. Thomas Howell) arrive on the scene, only to be immediately told to stand down and wait for federal agents. This understandably frustrates Grasso and eager fireman Loham (Lochlyn Munro), who just want to get in and get any survivors out of the building as soon as possible. When the feds arrive, they’re not much help– Agent Wilson (Judd Nelson) takes over command of the situation and makes it clear that the only viable course of action is to wait until the building’s self-detonating system of explosives goes off, six hours after the power is cut. This will kill anyone inside, but will also eliminate the threat of the bio-weapon escaping and making its way into the general populace. Cale, Mandy and the other survivors on the inside must find a way out of the building before it implodes while also avoiding the rampaging monsters that are still roaming the lower floors.
Unsurprisingly, The Terror Experiment gets its most unsettling and effective moments from the parts of the film that are closely patterned on the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995. It is established early on that many different people work in this building, and that there is a day care center right in the building. Once the bomb goes off, the scenes of panicked crowds trying to escape the building are disturbing enough– so much so that the introduction of the standard “zombie”/”rage virus” concept just seems redundant at best and distasteful at worst. The fact that the special effects are pitched at roughly the level of the standard SyFy Original Movie doesn’t help, and the fact that the entire thing comes in just under 80 minutes before the end credits roll means not much time is spent developing its characters or the suggestion that similar attacks are happening elsewhere in a major coordinated terrorist action. Maybe more of that ended up on the cutting room floor, which is unfortunate. That sort of ambition may have raised The Terror Experiment from a perfunctory thriller to something more interesting.
The Theatre Bizarre (2011)
Originally published on Film Monthly 8 May 2012
It’s difficult not to get overly excited about anthology films that feature favorite actors or filmmakers, and when The Theatre Bizarre was announced, it immediately got the attention of hardcore horror fans. An anthology featuring shorts directed by Richard Stanley (Dust Devil), Buddy Giovinazzo (Combat Shock), David Gregory (Plague Town), Jeremy Kasten (The Attic Expeditions), Douglas Buck (Family Portraits), Karim Hussain (La belle bête) and makeup effects legend Tom Savini seemed like a sure bet, and bleeding-edge, boundary-pushing horror seemed all but guaranteed. Now that the film is out on DVD after a hit festival run, salivating fans can finally see how this dream project turned out. Unfortunately, fans looking for something as mind-blowing as The Theatre Bizarre promised are likely to be sorely disappointed.
Opening with a threadbare framing story about a young woman who wanders into an abandoned theatre where a seemingly mechanized emcee (Udo Kier) introduces each story, The Theatre Bizarre is on shaky ground from its first frames. Richard Stanley’s short “The Mother of Toads” kicks things off, but aside from some beautiful scenery, the story is painfully straightforward: a young American couple in a foreign land meet a strange local who appears to be a witch (Catriona MacColl) and things turn out exactly as one would expect. There is also some awkward voiceover that feels tacked on, as if the audience needed more explanation for the characters’ actions. It’s not a promising start, and things don’t improve much with Buddy Giovinazzo’s “I Love You.” This short takes place in Berlin and features characters who speak French and German, but who in the film speak all their lines in English. While no doubt shot this way to make the short more accessible, the fact that English is clearly not the actors’ first language is extremely distracting, in much the same way as in Takashi Miike’s infamous Masters of Horror episode “Imprint.” This is especially unfortunate because Giovinazzo shoots his film beautifully and the story is simple but interestingly fractured.
Tom Savini is up next with “Wet Dreams,” a Twilight Zone-esque pile-up of dreams upon dreams that features Savini and fan favorite Debbie Rochon, as well as a lot of very unpleasant things happening to people’s bikini areas. The constant “waking up” from one dream into another grows tiresome quickly, but Savini still manages to get in some effectively nasty images in his short, and Debbie Rochon is fun. Following “Wet Dreams” is what is easily The Theatre Bizarre ‘s high point, Douglas Buck’s “The Accident.” This beautiful, spare short takes place on two different time lines: one is a mother (Lena Kleine) talking to her daughter (Mélodie Simard) at bedtime about an accident they witnessed earlier that day in which a motorcyclist died after running over a deer after passing the mother and daughter on a country road. Buck provides the audience with the little girl’s view, only giving glimpses of what happened. This is a beautiful piece of work, and is really so completely different from the rest of the film that it feels like it doesn’t belong. “The Accident” is so good that it is worth tracking down the whole film just to watch this short.
Douglas Buck’s fellow Canadian Karim Hussain follows “The Accident” with “Vision Stains,” an ambitious short that feels like it is somewhat hamstrung by its budget. The Writer (Kaniehtiio Horn) is a woman who has discovered that by draining the ocular fluid of a person as they die and injecting it into her own eye, she can see that person’s life flash before her eyes. She has taken it upon herself to find women who want to die– mostly homeless junkies– and document their lives this way. The Writer’s quest drives her to a transgressive act that was probably supposed to be much more graphic, but instead is dealt with mostly in a voiceover. The final short is David Gregory’s “Sweets,” a very odd short that depicts the breakup conversation of Estelle (Lindsay Goranson) and Greg (Guilford Adams), punctuated with flashbacks of the couple eating a lot of candy. The second half of the short feels like a gorier version of something you might have caught on Alive from Off Center on PBS in the late 80s– that may not necessarily be a complaint, but the two parts of the short feel so dramatically different they hardly seem to fit together at all.
Overall, The Theatre Bizarre is a crushing disappointment. Perhaps if some of the filmmakers had had more time or resources, they could have fleshed out more worthwhile shorts. Or perhaps the film is a fluke, a perfect storm of several filmmakers working at a low point in their game. Of the six shorts, only Douglas Buck’s “The Accident” is fully realized enough to stand on its own merits, with all the others coming in far below Buck’s film on virtually every level. Hopefully “The Accident” can find an audience outside The Theatre Bizarre, and hopefully the filmmakers involved can get back to their usual standard of quality after this misstep, which if nothing else proves that nobody knocks it out of the park every single time.
Thirst Street (2017)
Originally published on Film Monthly 29 November 2017
The box office success of the Fifty Shades of Grey films has thus far failed to inspire a return of Hollywood softcore popularized in the 80s and 90s with Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. Aside from a few stray examples of studios dipping their toes into those waters–of which only Unforgettable hit theaters with an “R” rating, and it was hardly a hit–Hollywood has remained skittish about sex on the big screen. While late-night cable softcore still exists, it resembles product coming off of an assembly line in the films’ rigid adherence to formula and rotating cast of a handful of adult actors and familiar locations. The heyday of European softcore kicked off in the 1970s with Just Jaeckin’s massively popular Emmanuelle (1974) is a distant memory for most filmgoers if they remember it at all. But Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street proves that even if softcore may not be quite ready to return to the mainstream yet, its history can provide inspiration for adventurous filmmakers looking to strike out into long-neglected cinematic terrain.
Gina (Lindsay Burdge) is an American flight attendant who returns home one day to find her long-term boyfriend has hanged himself. Severely traumatized and in serious shock, Gina alm
ost immediately returns to work in hopes of avoiding having to face the emotional aftermath of his suicide. While on a layover in Paris, a pair of her fellow flight attendants (and her only friends) manage to get Gina out of her hotel room and out on the town. Gina meets bartender Jérôme (Damien Bonnard) at a former cabaret that has become a lurid strip joint since the women’s tourist guide was published, and after a passionate one-night stand Gina is anxious to return to Paris and Jérôme. She soon impulsively decides to move to the city in order to continue their relationship, which is very obviously one-sided: Jérôme is a lothario picking up women while he waits for his rock singer girlfriend Clémence (Esther Garrel) to return from touring. When she does come back, Gina becomes increasingly desperate for Jérôme’s attention and willing to do almost anything to get it.
Thirst Street mimics the look of 70s and 80s Euro-softcore films with its neon-lit underground clubs and soft focus. A particularly memorable dance routine set to Sandy Posey’s “Born a Woman” would not have been out of place in, say, Gérard Kikoïne’s Love Circles: A woman in a partial cowboy costume dances while bored men watch from the darkness and blow smoke into the neon light that barely illuminates the space around the stage. Anyone for whom names like Brigitte Lahaie, Fiona Richmond, Laura Gemser, and Glory Annen mean anything will find themselves in comfortably familiar territory. However, while director/co-writer Silver clearly took inspiration for the look and feel of Thirst Street from those films, he employs these approaches in the service of a much different type of story. A narration (provided by Anjelica Huston) both contributes to the “classy” posturing of some softcore films and provides a direct glimpse of Gina’s delusions.
Burdge gives a typically excellent performance as Gina, making the character simultaneously sympathetic and unsettling. It is established at the beginning that Gina sees her relationship with her soon-to-be-dead boyfriend as a classical Hollywood romance, but Silver and co-writer C. Mason Wells ground Gina’s life in mundane details. She’s jetting off to Paris to have marathon sex sessions with a man she barely knows, but she still has to pick up Plan B from the local pharmacy when he refuses to use a condom. She also contracts pink eye from Jérôme, which is both comically prosaic and tragic when she reads his casual offer to let her use the rest of the medication he was taking for it as a sign of devotion. As the film progresses, those ubiquitous neon lights start to feel less romantic and more like something out of an Argento film. Thirst Street is a fascinating, effective melding of different strains of European exploitation films with a very dark core of unaddressed grief and obsession, but it also has moments of surprising humor. While major studios continue to avoid frank sexuality and Hollywood softcore may never make a return to the big screen, this compelling and unique psychodrama clearly shows that there is still much to be mined from softcore’s traditionally “disreputable” history.
Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives (2010)
Originally published on Film Monthly 8 November 2010
Revenge cinema seems to be making a comeback. As filmmakers great and small alike continue to work through the post-Grindhouse resurgence of trash cinema and exploitation genres (and sub-genres and sub-sub-genres, etc. etc.), it only makes sense that the style of film that Tarantino paid explicit tribute to in Kill Bill would get another shot at the spotlight. And while some filmmakers have already made seriously unsettling new revenge films– the recent I Spit on Your Grave remake and Simon Rumley’s devastating Red, White, & Blue both come to mind– others are busily reminding us why sometimes revenge can be fun.
Enter writer/director Israel Luna, whose latest film is the revenge epic Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives. Happily, the film delivers exactly what you’d expect from such a title. Much like Paul Etheredge’s 2004 gay slasher HellBent, tweaking the gender and sexuality of the main characters makes Ticked-Off Trannies feel like a completely fresh take on some familiar material.
After a hard night’s work, the dancers working for Pinky La’Trimm (Kelexis Davenport) decide to go out for a few drinks to cheer up their friend Bubbles Cliquot (Krystal Summers). At the bar, the girls are met by Emma Grashun’s (Erica Garcia) brand-new boyfriend, who suggests a triple date with Emma, Bubbles, and Rachel Slurr (Willam Belli). Unfortunately, the evening soon turns sour when Boner (Tom Zembrod) shows up. Boner had a date with Bubbles and was not happy with what he found in her panties, so to make sure that no one gets the wrong idea, he decides to take violent revenge. The resulting altercation puts Bubbles in a coma and two of the other dancers in the ground. When Bubbles wakes up, the remaining girls join her in training with Fergus (Richard D. Curtin) to learn how to kick ass. When Boner and his pals return, they’re not just dealing with defenseless dancers– you can totally figure out the rest from the title!
Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives is hilarious low-budget exploitation fun. It delivers plenty of blood, extended dance scenes, and absolutely killer dialogue. It seems like a lot of the dialogue may have been improvised, which works brilliantly. The girls are all fantastic and their sense of comic timing and the way they play off each other is tremendous fun to watch. If more low-budget genre films were this much nasty fun, the world would be a better place.
Tokyo Gore Police (2008)
Originally published on Film Monthly 9 November 2008
Recently, the Tokyo Shock DVD banner of Media Blasters became involved in film production with their Tokyo Shock Originals. The first film in this series was The Machine Girl, a gleefully cartoonish revenge film in which a girl has her arm replaced with a machine gun to get revenge on the bullies who killed her brother. The film comes across like the bastard daughter of Takashi Miike and Monty Python– limbs get hacked off with alarming regularity, and the resultant blood spray looks more like it’s coming out of an industrial-strength paint machine than a human. Still, The Machine Girl had a weird charm that helped it become strangely endearing, so hopes were high for Tokyo Shock’s next production, Tokyo Gore Police.
Eihi Shiina (of Takashi Miike’s Audition) stars as Ruka, seemingly sole member of a very specialized police force. Mutants called “Engineers” have begun appearing all over Tokyo, their murderous rampages compounded by the fact that they’re nigh invincible. Only by destroying or separating the part of their body that houses a key-shaped tumor can the Engineers be killed. Ruka has risen through the ranks of the privatized police force as the best “Engineer Hunter” (when the guys with machine guns can’t get the job done, she comes in with a sword and finishes the job). As the mysterious Engineers become more and more bold in their attacks against the general populace and the police, Ruka learns that not everything is as it seems.
On paper, Tokyo Gore Police seems like a can’t-miss proposition. The film’s plot is a mish-mash of RoboCop, Blade Runner, and countless manga that came before it. There’s a lot of pitch-black humor, much of it in the form of fake television commercials directly recalling RoboCop. The film takes the approach of The Machine Girl and turns everything up to 11: it’s so relentlessly bloody, brutal, and nihilistic that it makes The Machine Girl look like Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. It may well take the title of most gory film ever made from Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. The character design is straight out of perverse manga, with such monstrosities as penis-nosed women, a limbless S&M queen who makes Cherry Darling look uncommitted, and a man whose penis transforms into a Cronenbergian elephant gun.
So what’s wrong here? Despite its pedigree and obvious care to cater to as many otaku as possible, Tokyo Gore Police feels strangely empty. Perhaps it’s too much of a good thing– at 110 minutes, the ridiculous gore starts to weary. Perhaps it’s the fact that the film promises exactly what it delivers. Tokyo Gore Police is the most textbook high-concept title to come along since Snakes on a Plane. The film seems intent on delivering exactly what you might expect and nothing more, trading out any character development for more scenes of dicks being chomped off or people being cut in half vertically.
In the end, this lack o
f any real involvement with the characters might be the film’s undoing. Eihi Shiina, as the film’s protagonist, barely has any lines in the film and spends most of its running time with a blank look that betrays no emotion. You can’t help but empathize with her as the film goes on, throwing depravity after atrocity until you’re completely inured to whatever weirdness comes next. The film will no doubt be a must-see for fans of this sort of thing, but it doesn’t have much to offer anyone else. Still, I’m looking forward to see what else Tokyo Shock Originals comes up with, so long as it can manage some balance between cartoon gore and the other things that people go to the movies to see.
Tomboy (1985)
Originally published on Criticplanet.org
Crown International Pictures has a proud history of female empowerment, producing stories of women taking roles traditionally filled by men and excelling at them: see Coach (1978), in which Cathy Lee Crosby is accidentally hired to be a boys’ high school basketball coach. Or My Chauffeur (1986), where a wacky 80′s Valley Girl becomes the first female chauffeur working for a snooty limo service. In Tomboy, yet another barrier to equality is smashed when a girl is depicted working on a race car and getting totally dirty. As long as you completely ignore the specifics– namely, that “Coach” seems to feel obligated to seduce one of her underage basketball players, that Casey in My Chauffeur ends up sleeping with the boss’s son, or that Tomboy ends in a severely anticlimactic compromise for its lead female character– you might even say that some of these films are downright progressive!
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 69