Schlocktober Top 10!

To make up for my lack of reviewing in October I thought I'd celebrate getting back to my regularly scheduled programming by honoring my neglected tradition of doing monthly top 10 reviews. Back in 2006 I started writing down every movie I watch. Separated by monthly columns I number them and mark them with an asterisk if it's a first-time-view. Out of those first-times-views, I compose a top 10. I list them as best as I can in order of enjoyment, obviously number 1 would be my favorite. This doesn't necessarily mean it's traditionally "the best". I'm an unconventional critic and opinions are relative. So without further adieu, here is my Top 10 for October 2009.



1. Hausu (1977)




If movies had souls, this movie would be my soul mate. This movie brings a new meaning to the phrase "now I've seen EVERYTHING!". When you watch as much as I do you sometimes wonder if you've reached the epitome of weirdness. This movie convinced me that there will always be something else, something that goes above and beyond. Simply put, this is a haunted house movie, but so so much more! The story revolves around seven girls who go to one of their Aunt's house for vacation. The plot is relatively insignificant, immediately bizarre things start to happen and the girl are killed in more and more insane ways. It was made by experimental Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi who got his start directing television commercials (if you want to see a really funny example of this, do a youtube search for "Charles Bronson Mandom"). You can really see the influence as the movie itself is one giant, flashy, quick-edited, commercial for total BEDLAM! I read a review where someone said it's as if Beetlejuice were directed by Dario Argento, only it's SO MUCH BETTER! I would sooner compare it to the bastard child of Holy Mountain and the Yokai Monsters: 100 Monsters. This is the kind of movie that makes you wonder why the film industry didn't come to a complete halt because it just doesn't get any better. Describing the movie is nearly impossible, reviewing it is just my tripping over endless compliments. So if you trust me and want to have a visually maddening mind fuck of an experience, find yourself a copy of this life changing movie.



2. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)


I'm ashamed to say how long I went without seeing this. I'm a big fan of both Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. The movie revolves around two sisters who were formerly in show business. One, a crazed washed up child star (Davis), the other handicapped ex-movie star (Crawford) who's tormented and completely at the mercy of her insane sibling. Victor Buono gave a truly outstanding performance as well. I'm only used to him as King Tut from the Batman series from 1966. Robert Aldrich directed it, he later direct Davis and Buono again in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte.



3. Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933)



Finally, my first encounter with the diabolical Dr. Mabuse. Often cited as the first super villain, Mabuse uses his powers of hypnosis and mind control to wreak havoc and destruction from behind padded walls and even beyond the grave. This Fritz Lang classic was the second out of three, but was later followed by many semi-sequels directed by other people. This is considered the last hurrah from German Expressionism.



4. Frenzy (1972)



I always liked him, but lately I've really been diving into Alfred Hitchcock's vast body of work. I recently got a set of his early movies, I also received the Hitchcock/Truffaut book for my birthday. After having seen Family Plot earlier this year (which I quite enjoyed despite it's reputation), I wasn't sure what to expect from this one. A guy is running around raping and strangling women with neckties in London. The guy being framed is down on his luck having just lost his job, apartment and is in an over-all shitty mood. When his ex-wife becomes one of the victims he becomes the prime suspect. It's filled with Hitchcock's quirky sense of humor. I particularly loved the banter between the inspector and his wife as she's serving him these elaborate meals that he hates. Great stuff!




5. the Unknown (1927)



the world silent film is almost completely untouched by me. I'm slowly trying to work my way through the history of film. Silent pictures have always seemed like a big hurdle for me, mainly because I didn't know where to start. In my research I started to become fascinated with Lon Chaney Senior. He was really an amazing person, both of his parents were deaf so he was a natural at acting in a silent film. The Unknown is about an armless knife thrower at a circus who's in love with his lovely assisstant (a very young Joan Crawford), who is afraid of the touch of a man. Naturally they'd be a perfect couple right? Well, as it turns out he really does have arms, he conceals them in a girdle because he's a wanted man and has a strange deformity , two thumbs on one hand! This horror classic just gets weirder and weirder!


6. the Invisible Man (1933)



Not sure why I put off watch this for so long. I probably didn't take into account how much fun it would be to see an invisible person do all sorts of things. Smoking a cigarette, throwing things, acting like a ghost. Claude Rains really made this role his own, considering you never actually see him act! This has easily earned him the title of my favorite Universal Monster!




7. Tales from the Crypt (1972)/ Vault of Horror (1973)



Ok, so they're two different movies. They're based from basically the same comic, they're both Amicus Anthologies, they were made back to back, and they just go together! Plus, I don't think I could choose between them! Tales from the Crypt stars Joan Collins, Ralph Richardson, Roy Dotrice and Peter Cushing. Five people enter a tomb for seemingly unknown reasons and one by one are told their stories by the Crypt Keeper (Ralph Richardson). In Vault of Horror (aka "Further Tales from the Crypt") five men enter an elevator that takes them to the basement where imbibements are ready for them, they get comfortable, eat , drink and slowly begin to tell of their "nightmares", horrible things they've done, or have been done to them. The Terry Thomas episode was really fun and brought some comic relief in. Buy the double disc! See them both!



8. Sisters (1973)



Brian DePalma's homage to Alfred Hitchcock. After a pair of siamese twins are separated, strange things begin to happen. Before the film's release DePalma was using different themes from different Hitchcock movies. Marnie, Rear Window, etc... Until it was suggested to him that he should just get Bernard Hermann to score the film! So he did and it works beautifully. I was really impressed with William Finley in this movie. After seeing him in the Phantom of the Paradise I almost didn't recognize him. In a lot of ways, he steals the show.


9. This Night I Will Possess your Corpse (1967)



Zé do Caixão is up to his old shenanigans again! Still trying to find a woman to bare his evil spawn. I actually liked this second instalment of the Coffin Joe series even more than the first, At Midnight I'll Steal you Soul. With essentially the same plot it's clear that José Mojica Marins had a bigger budget to work with. I enjoyed watching him scare girls with spiders in their beds and ravish the toughest girl amidst the screams of the other girls being bitten by snakes. I felt like the character had more depth in this movie and showed borderline human emotions. The Jigoku-esque nightmare sequence depicting a colorized version of Hell is worth seeing the movie for alone!



10. You'll Find Out (1940)



I've been highly anticipating the release of this Universal horror comedy of the "Spooks Run Wild" variety. The story revolves around Kay Kyser's band, who are playing at a young heiress' birthday party. Several creeps are out to kill the young lady so they can have her inheritance. The villains are played by Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre. This is one of the funniest movies of this genre that I have yet to see. Kyser was a surprisingly silly and charming leading man. The gags were great, the music was great, and Peter Lorre was on top of his game! What more could you want? How about a SONOVOX?! Yes, this movie is super cool.



Honorable Mentions:
the Wolf Man (1941), the Devil Doll (1936), the Raven (1963), Calling Dr. Death (1943), the Dark Backward (1991), the Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) [this would have made the top 10 but I bumped it down since it doesn't really fall into the horror genre, just to keep a theme going]



Lon Chaney Jr. (1906-1973)



Though none of his movies made the top 10, I feel that he deserves a
special acknowledgement for being so charismatic in all eight movies I saw him in this month.

Delinquent Escort Child aka "You Can't Tell Me Anything!"

This week for Propaganda month I watched a few trashy sex "dramas", starting with the JD Classic "Delinquent Daughters". This being one of my personal favorite sub-genre's of exploitation I was excited to see this 1944 low budget pooper. It starts out with a bunch of cops investigating the suicide of a local teenage girl at her high school, there's a "bad girl" (there always has to be one) named Sally (played by Teala Loring, a pretty Rita Hayworth-ish actress who like so many others was doomed to play bit roles in movies like this and "Return of the Ape Man", she was also uncredited as a telephone operator in "Double Indemnity") who convinces her girl friend's to act "casual" by actually seeming overly guilty for some reason. As it turns out, the last place the girl was seen was the local teen hang out, which is really a cover for all kinds of illegal activities, run by a typical movie jerk/villain type named Nick Gordon (played by Jon Dawson who was also in...nothing worth mentioning) who made a career out of getting teenagers to carry out his various crimes. The movie started out pretty interesting, they're hangout spot was neat and I love seeing teenagers in the past, or at least Hollywood's perception of teenagers. The story starts to lose you somewhere around the middle when there's about 20 minutes of exposition filmed outside with literally NO LIGHTING, you're looking at blackness and listening to pointless dialogue. After that you get to see the local judge reprimand all of the teenager's parents for not taking responsibility for their kids. The highlight of the film is when our female protagonist June (who's quite boring unmemorable as a character and an actress) comes home late to find her comically angry/abusive father waiting up for her "what a nice daughter you've turned out to be!" *slaps her in the face* "but daddy let me explain!" "you can't explain", "but daddy let me tell you" "you can't tell me anything" HA! The classic words of a shitty parent in a 1940's juvenile delinquency film. Another interesting piece of trivia is that Teala Loring recently (within the past few years) died in a car accident, which her character did in the movie, OOPS...gave away the ending. Who cares?



The second bill on the triple feature is the long forgotten "Escort Girl". The story of a woman trying to hide the fact that she runs an escort service from her bratty, ungrateful daughter who just happens to be engaged to the undercover lawyer who's investigating the underground bureau. This movie is fairly decent despite it's only big flaw, that being how terribly choppy it is. Not sure if it was a damaged print or if it was cut for time, but the film cuts scenes sometimes right in the middle of crucial dialogue. It can be very frustrating as I was actually interested in the plot! The highlight of the movie is the pointless strip tease in the middle of the film, totally caught me off guard! Seeing the hookers have girl talk in their dressing room seemed more cute than sleazy, but of course, they're actresses, not real prostitutes. I wasn't satisfied with the ending, and thought it was very shitty that the daughter was so insensitive to her hard working mother's situation, but whatever. It's just a movie, a pretty bad one too. With propaganda such as this, good and bad are in as high a contrast as the resolution of the shitty print.




The final film in the triple feature was the sleaziest and most enjoyable. "Child Bride" from 1938 starring... who cares? What makes exploitation movies of this caliber so much fun is that we can usually relate in some way. Maybe not to the later exploitation films of the 70's where actors like Rudy Ray Moore takes on three rednecks then tumbles from a cliff buck naked. These early propaganda movies usually dealing with marijuana, alcohol, sex, teenage rebellion. These things are fairly typical in movies and our own experiences in general, making these films laughable. The thought of applying them to your own life is even more laughable. Child Bride stands apart from this. Both offensive, tacky and bizarre, it's hard to believe there was a time that marrying children was acceptable. Of course it was never women marrying boys, just creepy old honkies lusting after 10, 11, 12 year old girls. The creep in this movie is especially villainous, he kills the girl's father and blackmail's the mother (threatening to frame her for the murder) so he can have her nubile daughter for keeps. Had the movie not been so over the top, it may have actually disturbed me. Not to be so naive as to think this kind of thing didn't go on (well into the 50's and 60's even *ahem* Jerry Lee Lewis), but thinking of it in terms as a serious social issue is what's really disturbing. Which made it all the more entertaining! I give it my utmost recommendation, if you're into that sort of thing. "That sort of thing" being creepy, tasteless, out-dated garbage!

Propaganda Fest Part 1

I've decided to dedicate this month to drugsploitation and juvenile delinquency films. I've been sitting on a hoard of these for quite some time and in attempt to keep my hands off the horror movies until next month, these fiendishly silly exploits should keep me tide over. I started with Reefer Madness which I surprisingly held off this long without seeing. Upon finally having watched it, my prior disinterest was validified. In fact, it was probably the least entertaining of the triple feature. Although it is certainly entertaining watching kids take one puff of pot and start acting like it was laced with crack, heroin and lsd. Overall it was a bit boring and probably would have been more entertaining had I actually been high, which from what I've gathered from this film's fan base is exclusively how it should be viewed. How delightfully ironic and self defeating!

Which brings me to the second bill on the triple feature, Marihuana: the Devil's Weed! This one was less about Marihuana, more about avoiding bad guys with villainous moustaches. A group of carefree teens party at a dope peddler's house, the girl's decide to go skinny dipping (you see nipple! 1930's nipple!) one of the girl's drowns, because you know, you're supposed to wait 30 minutes after smoking marihuana. This event sparks a series of misfortunes for our female protagonists , somehow this is directly related to her leaving home, living in sin with her boyfriend, getting knocked up, him becoming a gangster thug to try and support her and her unborn child and getting himself killed in the process, she has her baby, gives it up for adoption and becomes a drug dealer. Actually, what made this movie different from the others I watched is that it actually was kind of depressing, completely unrealistic, but still just really negative and trashy. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, I guess that's what they were going for and probably achieved it more so than the others.

The final film in my triple feature was the most difficult to find the poster for. I watched it under the title "Marijuana Menace" , which I had never heard of, come to find out the reason is because it's more commonly known as "Assassin of Youth". Despite all three films being somewhat slow at times, this one kept me smiling through out the majority of the film. What makes this drugsploitation flick different from the others are it's great characters. Aside from the infamous piano playing Ralph (Dave O'brien) from Reefer Madness (who simply was NOT given enough screen time) and the moustache man from Marihuana none of the characters are very memorable. In Assassin of Youth, the bad kids are comically bad. Particularly in the opening scene when Ms. Frisbee (that's right, FRISBEE) falls off her bike and a group of teenagers cackle at her injury, HA! This set the tone for the whole movie. Ms. Frisbee was played by an actress named Fern Emmett, who looked like a cross between Margaret Hamilton and John Turturro. I enjoyed her so much as the gossiping small town spinster that I had to look her up and see what else she was in, I was surprised and impressed by her body of work. She was in over 200 low budget movies between 1930 and her death in 1946, making her a hero in my eyes! I'm making a special effort to see her 1939 film "Romance of the Potato", which is a contender for the most amazing title of all time.

I also really enjoyed Faye McKenzie who played Linda Clayton, the bad girl. Though maybe not the greatest actress to grace the silver screen, she embodied the essence of what the role needed, and really knew how to work that pretty face. I think the movie would have been better if it had just been Linda Clayton and Ms. Frisbee hurling insults at each other.

Alas, these are propaganda films. I think I deserve some kind of award for sitting through all three of these movies stone sober. Oh well...