Island of the Living Dead (2006)
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The Beginning of the End
Nov 5
This One’s All Ken’s Fault
Oct 31
Giordano Bruno Mattei — alias Jordan B. Matthews… alias Stefan Oblowski… alias Vincent Dawn… alias Pierre Le Blanc… alias Frank Klox, and David Hunt, and Jimmy Mattheus, and Gilbert Roussel, and… oh, you get the idea — started working in the movies as an editor. It turned out he had a genuine talent for arranging the bits and pieces of other people’s movies. Unfortunately, that’s a a habit he took with him when he started making movies of his own. Far from being unhappy with the lack of originality in the Italian movie business, Mattei thrived on it. Even decades later, when times and fashions had changed, he kept “borrowing” from the same sources he and his colleagues had ripped off years ago.
But though he stole liberally from other, better films, he never seemed to understand what made those other films better. So he usually ended up stealing all the wrong things, and garbling them pretty badly. Still, his genuine talent as an editor meant his films, awful though they might be, were usually pretty well-assembled. His technical skill allowed him to make some of the most genuinely entertaining Bad Movies of all time. They are so consistently bad, and so consistently entertaining, that they formed a subgenre unto themselves, and approach the status of post-modern art.
Some artists have their statues built while they are still alive; others — the outsiders, the mavericks, the visionaries — must struggle to scratch their initials on the plinth. Say what you will about Bruno Mattei, one thing is certain: he left his defiant B.M. all over the history of cinema.
So join us through the month of November, as we celebrate Brunoween: the holiday that starts a little too late, and keeps going on and on, long after you wish it would stop.
There’s no doubt about it: Homo sapiens is an uppity species, very much inclined to overrate itself. A species that can always stand to be taken down a peg or two. A species that needs a regular dose of reality.
So join us as we take a look at some films in which Man receives a sharp, if not necessarily short, reminder of his actual place in the food chain.
It’s TEETH AND TENTACLES – all through August at the B-Masters’ Blog!
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.
Monkey Business
Jun 13
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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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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.
Once upon a time there was a pilot movie for a series about a paranormal investigator, fighting the forces of darkness in a major American city. Our hero believes that a recent series of brutal murders may be connected to the supernatural… but can he get the authorities to believe him in time?
It may sound familiar, but believe me: it isn’t. The pilot in question is Dark Intruder (1965), starring Leslie Nielsen as a debonaire ghost-chaser in turn-of-the-century San Francisco. The show so far ahead of its time that it was turned down by all three major networks. Released instead to theaters as the bottom half of an obscure double bill, it came back from the dead occasionally as late-night TV filler through the seventies. Since then, though, it’s been ignored — which is a shame: its flaws are no worse than those of other TV productions of the time, and its strong points are considerable.
And thinking of San Francisco, time for some shameless self-promotion… Anybody in the San Francisco area who’s looking for something to do next week might check out a concert by the San Francisco Choral Artists: a program called “Poetry on Musical Wings”, a celebration of particularly successful unions of words and music. In addition to some of the usual suspects (Shakespeare, Rilke… that lot), they’re doing a very short, yet incredibly lovely setting by Oakland composer Michael Kaulkin of a poem by… (ahem) Me. Your not-so-humble Braineater. The music is serious, but the words are silly, and the result is… well, maybe you’ll hear for yourself.
The performances are on June 9 in Palo Alto; June 10 in Oakland; and June 16 in San Francisco. More information is here.
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!)
So: it was the early-to-mid 1970′s, the Golden Age of the made-for-TV movie. From the legendary producer Dan Curtis came the story of a journalist who discovers that the boundary between this world and The Next is very thin… and that horrible creatures are trying to cross it with distressing regularity. No, I am not talking about “The Night Stalker”. I’m talking about The Norliss Tapes (1973)…
…though frankly, if I had been talking about “The Night Stalker”, I doubt if I could have mentioned “The Night Stalker” as many times as I mention “The Night Stalker” while I’m not talking about “The Night Stalker”. Because “The Norliss Tapes”, intended to be the pilot for a weekly series, just didn’t have the necessary magic… while “The Night Stalker”, which had been intended as a one-off, went on to become one of the most memorable horror series in TV history. Why did the one show succeed, while the other disappeared into oblivion? Read on…
Baffled is right
May 25
While we hear a great deal, in one pop cultural context or another, about The People Who Cancelled Star Trek, what I want to know is—
Who was it that deprived the world of a television series that must have been pitched with the line, “So—Leonard Nimoy is a racing-car driver who turns occult detective after he starts experiencing psychic flashes.”
Sigh.
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