…though I did hit the obligatory Hasselhoff references

HARD TO BE A GOD

In 1989, before the dust had settled, before anyone even really knew what the future held in store, a group of filmmakers from France teamed up with a group of filmmakers from West Germany and the Soviet Union — two countries that wouldn’t even exist by the time their work was finished — to make an ambitious, batty, corny sci-fi fantasy film called Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein, known (well, not really known at all) in English as Hard to be a God, that ended up being a telling reflection of the upheaval and anxiety that permeated east and west Europe during the final days of the 1980s.

BLACK CAT

Black Cat is brisk, violent and reasonably entertaining with some good stunts and effects. If it has a flaw, it is that it sets such a brisk, heart pounding pace at the beginning that it is virtually impossible to keep that level of dynamism up, and sure enough, once Cat goes into training the film slows down. It’s not boring, but it is less defined than Besson’s Nikita or Badham’s Assassin/Point of No Return. The dehumanising and rebuilding of Cat at the CIA facility doesn’t ring true, as for the majority of her time there, she still has the same anti-social chip on her shoulder. But yet, when it becomes time for her to go out into the real world and kick ass, she does so willingly. Adding to the confused mess, is that Cat’s first assignment – which is really a test – is structured so that she feels betrayed by her own team. Yet, afterward, despite her initial anger, she chooses to ride with it.

Yes. Well. Sorry about that. March kind of went pear-shaped there. As did a large chunk of April. I’m not quite out of the mire yet, but at least I’m towards the periphery of it and starting to towel myself down. I’m not going to get carried away and start making promises about updating more regularly, though. That Way Lies Madness.

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DOCTOR X (1932)

Early in 1932, finally accepting that they could no longer afford to ignore the ever-growing audience for horror movies – or forego the profits associated with them – a reluctant Warner Bros. bit the bullet and commissioned the studio’s first real genre film…albeit one variously disguised in advertising as a “thriller”, a “mystery”, a “comedy” and even a “love story”.

The good news? There’s a deformed, psychotic killer on the loose in New York, who strangles, stabs and cannibalises his victims, and only a bizarre scientific experiment can reveal his identity.

The bad news? There’s a wisecracking reporter on the case.

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NORWEGIAN NINJA

Arne Treholt is, in fact, a real person, which people probably know if those people are Norwegian. He was a member of the Norwegian Labour Party and, in 1984, was arrested and convicted of espionage and treason after being accused of passing confidential data to agents of the KGB during the 70s and first half of the 80s. The trial was sensational not just because it came at the height of Cold War paranoia, but because the evidence against Treholt was considered, by many, to be somewhat flimsy, if not totally non-existent. Accusations continue to be made, as late as a book published in 2010, that most of the damning evidence against Treholt was fabricated or planted by antagonistic intelligence organizations. Regardless of the questionable nature of the evidence, the politician was found guilty and sentenced to twenty years in prison, only eight of which he served before being pardoned.

As imagined by the movie, Arne Treholt was the commander of an elite, ultra top secret special force of ninjas who answered only to the king of Norway. After endlessly irritating Stay Behind, a anti-Communist black ops organization with close ties tot he CIA, Arne and his band of ninjas were either framed for treason or murdered.

In Luggage Of The Gods, a jet airliner dumps its cargo over a group of people still in the stone age. While you may think that this movie is imitating the more famous movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, it was actually made before The Gods Must Be Crazy hit U.S. shores, so I’ll give the movie some slack there. And that’s the nicest gesture I can give towards this movie.

THE KILLING OF SATAN

This is a Filipino film about a man who uses Catholic magic to battle the Devil. That alone makes seeking it out a worthwhile effort for anyone who enjoys bizarre cinema.

Review Snippet:
While Lando is talking to the Ghost of Chicken Fried Uncles Past, the Satanists are roughing up the villagers. The poor Catholics are no match for the Prince of Magic’s powers. Heck, they are not even a match for the lesser Satanists who use red radar waves to freeze them (I never realized that religion could be so exciting).

Lesson Learned:
Satan is an immovable object and an irresistible force.

TROLL HUNTER

When Troll Hunter first showed up on my radar, I can’t say I was all that enthusiastic about tracking it down. I mean, sure, the plot sounded interesting — a covert government organization whose sole purpose is to control Norway’s not-entirely-secret population of trolls — but the fact that it was yet another “found footage from a crew of film student documentarians” turned me off. However, people I trusted suggested that maybe this time I might find things to be different. Even then, though, I was hesitant; people told me the same thing about Cloverfield, and that didn’t really pan out for me. In the end, though, no amount of misgiving was going to actually prevent me from watching a movie about a harried bureaucrat who has to deal with renegade trolls, especially when I saw that the trolls were rendered not as some terrifying new style monster, but as the big-nosed, lumbering galoots they’d always been drawn as in old fairy tales.

Make no mistake about it — I know my stance puts me far outside the bounds of intelligent, rational, human society, but I liked…

CYBORG

A storied writer, or possibly a drunk (oh, who am I kidding — there’s no difference), once said of a particular piece of writing that it was a mirror: when a monkey looked in, no philosopher looked out. While I’m sure Dr. Zaius would take umbrage at this gross generalization, the adage stands, at least for me, when it comes to the films of director Albert Pyun. I cannot hate them, no mater how bad they are, because when I look into them, I see myself (a gibbering monkey). Albert Pyun has a magnificent, sprawling vision in his head. He has the drive to express this vision artistically, in his case, through the medium of film. And nearly every attempt at expressing this vision winds up a boring, dismal failure and a biting reminder that sometimes the gap between our ability to envision something and our ability to execute that vision is insurmountably vast. Albert Pyun’s sundry failures are me — if I set out to recreate in film the lavish visions I have, they would wind up, I suspect, looking a lot like the films of Albert Pyun, except maybe even worse.

By the 1970s, leading roles in major Hollywood studio movies had dried up for the most part for Henry Fonda. So he took whatever projects he could get, from made-for-television movies to roles in foreign movies. So you might think that being cast in the drive-in flick The Great Smokey Roadblock, with its premise of a trucker with a truckload of prostitutes, was a career low. Surprisingly, the movie turns out to be quite entertaining.

Yes, it’s a bit behind my usual schedule, but here’s the review roundup for this year’s B-Fest.  The 2011 lineup was heavy on films I’d already covered, so as a special bonus, I’ve also reviewed a film from the 2009 schedule, which slipped through the cracks due to my being too busy with band business to do B-Fest reviews at all that year.

Mama Dracula (1980), in which hematologists get into more crap…

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), in which the roster of terrible B-movie vacation spots expands to include the El Paso hinterland…

Megaforce (1982), in which the good guys always win– even in the 80’s…

and…

The Pumaman (1980), in which flying like a moron is the least of our hero’s sub-standard qualities.