New in Brain Drops: a quick look at Libidomania (1979) and the other Mondo/Sexy-style movies Bruno Mattei made early in his career. If there’s anything worse than a Mattei zombie movie, it’s a Mattei Mondo — and for some of the same stolen reasons.

Warning: This review has some descriptions of fake, but icky, sexual behavior. You may not want to read this one around mealtime. Actually, you may not want to read this one at all… except that it does shed a little light on the development of Bruno’s particular film-making style.

There are some kinds of brew on the shelf that you pass on by because you know nothing about them. Beer is one obscure brew by Hollywood that you should sample if you have the opportunity. It’s been crafted with care and has the pleasant taste of genuine comedy.

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HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980)

In which Bruno and Claudio succeed in convincing us that the zombie apocalypse is not merely inevitable, but highly desirable…

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[Warning – NSFW: boobies, mutilated corpses, and tap-dancing.]

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It’s umm…it’s been a while. But tonight I’m high on champagne and Janelle Monae and ready to catch up on my updates. So here we goes…

SLAM DANCE
Even though Slam Dance is not as well remembered or regarded as the heavyweights of neo-noir movies (Body Heat, To Live and Die in L.A., maybe even Blade Runner if you want to cast the net that wide), it was one of the most forward thinking (Hulce’s character even foreshadows the rise of the “endless adolescent” that is usually attributed to the dotcom era), and it ends up being one of my favorites. I can get behind noir’s drive to turn despicable characters into anti-heroes, but it’s nice to see one who is actually, well, nice, if a bit screwy.

MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
If Corman’s earlier Poe films had been responses to and attempts to recreate the look of Hammer horror films, then Masque of the Red Death, while still maintaining the opulently decorated and vibrantly colored style of Hammer and the previous Poe Gothics, finds the director turning toward even loftier sources for influence. Here specifically, it’s obvious that Corman had recently watched Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal (which seams to have previously served as the influence for another Corman film, 1957?s The Undead).

DEATH SPA
Oh Death Spa, what have you done? All those years I spent bad-mouthing slasher films from the 1980s, then you go and immediately make yourself one of my all-time favorite horror films by being one of the most cracked, absurd examples of horror film making one is likely to stumble across. It’s probably because you actually have less to do with the American slasher films that permeated the horror scene during that prolific decade and instead can count yourself the peer of batshit insane Italian horror films from the same decade. You are less Jason Vorhees and Friday the 13th and more Lamberto Bava and Demons.

SEYTAN
The special thing about Turkish pulp films is how, even at their most plagiarized, they can serve as an example of just how unique a complete rip-off can be. After all, no one ever mistook Turkish Star Wars for regular Star Wars, or Bedi, the Turkish E.T., for E.T., the American E.T. And the same goes for Seytan, director Metin Erksan’s almost ludicrously faithful remake of The Exorcist.

TERROR ON TOUR
So is there anything that can redeem this movie? You might think the silliness of the band’s costumes is good for a laugh, but that’s exactly what it’s good for: a laugh A single laugh, and you can get that from a screencap without having endure watching the entire movie. It does offer up a pretty steady parade of attractive groupies willing to doff their tops and writhe around, but you can get just as much and more from movies that aren’t this boring. So no, there’s really not much that can redeem Terror on Tour. It’s best moment is its video box art, so you are better off looking at that and not wasting time with the movie within.

MANIAC
Esper’s films lack the good-natured, gee-whiz goofiness of films from a director like Ed Wood, Jr. With Wood’s films, whatever incompetence is on display is, in my opinion, more than compensated for by the boundless enthusiasm that obviously infuses them, and by the fact that so much of what is wrong with them translates into joyous entertainment. By contrast, Esper’s films are every bit as technically incompetent, but they are infused with such a meanness, such a twisted sense of misanthropy that they become difficult to celebrate even if we acknowledge the importance of Esper in the history of exploitation film.

MYSTERY IN BERMUDA
I have to wonder if that ending is an indication of just how catastrophic the loss of lucha cinema was to Rogelio Agrasanchez personally — if, for him, the only alternative to a world in which Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras no longer fought criminals and monsters on the big screen was no world at all? Whatever the case, Santo foiled Agrasanchez’s apocalyptic vision by appearing in several more lackluster features after Misterio, finally retiring with an especially woeful twofer of Florida-shot quickies in 1981. Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras, however, kept the faith and disappeared from the screen for the foreseeable future

APOCALYPSE CODE
I suppose that, as Pauline Kael did with Luc Besson, some could see a movie like Apocalypse Code as the death of Russian cinema. All those serious explorations of the human condition and the human soul, the eternal struggle of the state versus the individual, those slow-moving and contemplative works of art — all that gets swept away like a Czarist’s riches during the Revolution. In it’s place is a movie that is glossy, pretty, dumb, shallow, gratuitous, and sexy and that could have been made just as easily in France, the United States, England, or South Korea. But you know me. I like fun, dumb, sexy action films.

 

 

Island of the Living Dead (2006)

 
(Text of post lost to server crash)

 

Recently I found for sale four movies packaged in one DVD case. This movie collection was priced at five dollars, and when you include the tax I had to pay, that means that averages out to one dollar and forty cents for each movie. In the case of one of the movies in the collection I decided to review – The Final Patient – I got ripped off.

p>Running a little late with my roundtable review, but I WILL get to Gil Gerard’s carpety chest. Until then…

BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA So, just how wretched? Does it deserve to top a “worst of all time” list? Yeah, it probably does. Like I said, I went in prepared, and with the film being something of a running in-joke it made it pretty easy to get through. Also, I only sort of half-assedly paid attention to it. And I would have said that yeah, it deserves to be on any well-researched worst-of list, but not at the top. And then came the “it was all a dream” ending, and that rockets Brooklyn Gorilla if not to the top, then certainly up into the rarefied airs of dreadful movies. It’s certainly worse than Magic Lizard, but I still like it more than What Happens in Vegasand Mission: Impossible 2.
I AM NUMBER FOUR So despite my reservations I was left wanting more, waiting for resolutions that would have come in the adaptation of the sequel book, The Power of Six. Sadly the follow-up seems highly unlikely — one, because the movie didn’t make back its budget, and two, because Alex Pettyfer was also in the running for the biggest jerk involved with this project. He and Agron had been dating during production, but news broke of an acrimonious split the day after I Am Number Four hit theatres; basically the kiss of death for a movie aimed at the tween romance market.
DAWN OF THE MUMMY Many films focus on the glamour of the modeling industry, but it seems that it’s only the horror genre that concerns itself with its dangers. Movies like Horror of Spider Island and Bloody Pit of Horror have shown us how, time and again, models and those charged with tending to them have been called upon to place themselves in harm’s way, like soldiers at the front. And perhaps no more credible presentation of that reality can be found than in 1981’s Dawn of the Mummy — even if that film also asks us to believe that an American fashion magazine would bankroll a whole crew travelling to Egypt just to shoot dresses that look like old lady nightgowns.
STREET LAW I love writing about poliziotteschi purely because the nature of the films gives you so much to think about, all the while never once forgetting to drench you with ultra-bloody squibs, car crashes, and guys brandishing shotguns while shouting and wearing balaclavas. But they rarely let you relish the violence without also forcing you to contemplate the costs. Street Law, while I was viewing it, struck me as a very good example of the genre without being one of my favorites. The more I let it simmer in my mind, however, and the more I realized how complex and ambitious its philosophy was, the more my appreciation for it grew.
DA KHWAR LASME SPOGMAY Simply calling Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay “a Pakistani film” would likely send any serious minded booster of that nation’s cinema into paroxysms of despair. The Pashto language film industry that produced Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay, which serves an overwhelmingly male audience in the country’s northern border region, is considered to be pretty much the absolute gutter of Pakistan’s film making culture. For Americans, you’d have to imagine meeting a person from a foreign country whose only exposure to American cinema was through seeing Manos: The Hands of Fate, and who tried to characterize the whole of the U.S.’s filmic output based on that.

From Enzo G. Castellari, the Italian director of movies like Great White and The Inglorious Bastards, comes Tuareg – The Desert Warrior, starring Mark Harmon as the title figure. With a bigger budget than usual, plus a screenplay that gives the audience an unconventional hero, Castellari creates a B movie epic unlike any other movie in his career.

You know, the one about the cop in the Blade Runnerish future who’s all mopey about his son being killed that one time until the immortal guy who helped ancient dudes magically create Stonehenge and the Trojan Horse shows up and instructs said cop on how to use his own unknown magical abilities to turn his dead kid’s favorite toy into a 40 foot tall rampaging fire-breathing robot dinosaur that he can use to help him fight crime.

Yep, that old saw.

Anyway, see what happens when that cop finally puts the petal to the metal and serves up some Steel Justice.

(And, yes, I just like that banner better. Suck it, other B-Masters!)