After the failure of The Oz Film Manufacturing Company, it was a decade before the next attempt to bring the Oz stories to the screen. In 1924, silent comedian Larry Semon paid a small fortune for the rights to Frank Baum’s first Oz novel – and then proceeded to toss 99% of the book aside, creating instead a nightmarish pseudo-Oz tale featuring bottom jokes, sexual harassment and vomiting farmyard animals.
That whirring noise you hear is Frank Baum spinning in his grave.
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While we’re on the subject of horrors, I’ve also tried to fix up the screenshots in my review of ZOMBIE, although I think they’re still a bit dark.
Through the latter months of 1914, L. Frank Baum and his business partners continued their battle to take the author’s stories to the cinema-going public, although sadly with little success. After failing to find distribution in America, their next production was shipped to England, cut up for kiddie films, then eventually glued back together…more or less. The company’s third release found favour with the critics but not with the public, dealing the fledgling film studio a mortal blow…
With a driving funk theme and blood-dripping title graphic, Khoon Khoon’s opening credits clearly announce that the film’s director, Bollywood B movie maestro Mohammed Hussain, has changed with the times, moving on from the gee-whiz swashbuckling thrills of sixties to lurid subject matter much more in tune with the tenor of the seventies’ less restrained Indian cinema. What’s still intact, however, is Hussain’s tendency to hew very closely to Hollywood models in the crafting of his films. In the case of Khoon Khoon, Hussain’s model is Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry. While, admittedly, some of my enjoyment of Khoon Khoon arose from the novelty of it being a Bollywood adaptation of one of my favorite films, I also found it irresistibly watchable on its own terms. It is a taughtly-paced, rough-edged and deliciously trashy little thriller with all the garish accouterments I’ve come to love from 1970s Indian cinema. That it also turns that freaky, funky Bollywood funhouse mirror on an American classic is just the day-glo frosting on the cake.
On 5th May, MVD Visual will be unleashing upon us a 2-disc, Director’s Cut edition of the film that that very director once called “The Giant Spider Disaster“. The set will include a director’s commentary and an interview with Bill Rebane.
Island Of The Fishmen (surgically altered in the US to become Screamers), and Horrible aka Absurd, the sort-of sequel to the infamous Anthropophagus that re-teams Joe D’Amato and Aristide Massacessi. On July 28th, Blue Underground will be re-releasing two former Anchor Bay releases, Sergio Martino’s Torso aka The Bodies Bear Traces Of Carnal Violence, and The 10th Victim, directed by Elio Petri and starring Ursula Andress and Marcello Mastroianni.
Proving that some people never learn, Sony Pictures will be releasing the fourth entry in the Anaconda franchise, Anacondas: Trail Of Blood, on 2nd June. Tragically, this time around there’s no sign of The Hoff. The same day will also see the release of Fox’s Silent Venom, directed by Fred Olen Ray. Taking a tip from 1974’s Fer-De-Lance, this film gives us snakes on a submarine, and stars Luke Perry and Krista Allen. Genius Products [sic.] will be releasing Sea Beast on 30th June. Featuring mutated angler fish and Corin Nemec (in that order), this ought to be hugely cool, but sadly seems to be just more of your typical SciFi – sorry, SyFy – crap. I include the DVD cover here so that you can all marvel at its stunning lack of originality.
Jim Kelly, of course stars as Robert Sand, the black samurai — though when we first meet him, he’s indulging in Kelly’s other physical culture passion: tennis. The samurai is contracted to hunt down a criminal mastermind known as Janicot — The Warlock – who uses a voodoo cult as his army. Sand is uninterested in interrupting his vacation to chase after some goofy wizard, until he learns that Janicot has kidnapped Toki, the grand-daughter of Sand’s samurai master. Which means that before too long, Sand is up to his…well, basically his waist…in bullwhip-wielding midget hitmen and dudes dressed up as leopards. Not knowing beforehand what one was in for, a person can’t help but get a little excited about the prospect of Jim Kelly starring as the Black Samurai. If only someone besides Al Adamson had made this movie! But Al Adamson did make the movie, so we have to deal with what we have. And what we have is a wildly uneven, completely bizarre, generally sloppy adaptation of The Warlock, and had I not read The Warlock, I wouldn’t have known that so much of this movie’s ultra-bizarre nonsense is present in the source material. The devil worship and voodoo, the sex cult, the killer midgets — everything but the attack vulture, which was Al Adamson’s primary contribution to the proceedings, and one I assume must have made Marc Olden slap himself on the forhead for not having thought of it when he was writing the book.
