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This 1971 Shaw Brothers martial-arts flick is definitely full of action — energetic camerawork, gallons of stage blood, and a widescreen frame full of gracefully choreographed movement on the part of dozens of performers wielding an impressive variety of weapons all contribute to the film’s sense of urgent forward motion.
The New York Ripper
45/100The box art for this Lucio Fulci sleazefest describes it as “The Most Controversial Horror Film Ever Made,” which is a stretch. “Notorious” would be a better word. The New York Ripper‘s main claim to fame is its reputation as a sadistic, gory, and generally misogynist giallo—the Italian term referring to a combination of the crime and horror genres (basically a whodunit with slasher elements) that became popular in the 1960s and endured through the 1970s. Released in 1982 and styled after the psychologically ambitious thrillers of Hitchcock, it bears roughly the same relationship to the gialli film cycle that, say, Touch of Evil does to film noir. If the Fulci film isn’t exactly as self-aware as the Welles one, it still functions as a capper, a fitting culmination of a particular form.
Horror Hospital
Director Anthony Balch, known both as a collaborator on film projects with William S. Burroughs and as a shrewd cinema programmer and distributor, made this cheesy but imaginative and good-natured horror show on a shoestring. Swinging singles Jason (Robin Askwith) and Judy (Phoebe Shaw, credited as Vanessa Shaw) take a holiday at an old, vaguely threatening English manor. By the time they figure out that the other houseguests have been lobotomized, it’s too late — creepy Dr. Christian Storm (Michael Gough — I know him from Trog) and matriarch Aunt Harris (Ellen Pollock) are holding them captive in a weird kind of research laboratory with security provided by Daft Punk. Storm apparently wants to turn the poor kids into mindless sex slaves and only Frederick, a sympathetic dwarf servant, may be able to bust them out before that happens — assuming the mysterious, shambling mud monster doesn’t do them in first. Too bad Balch really blows his load in the film’s very first scene, prematurely debuting his pièce de résistance — a Rolls Royce with pop-out machete blades that serves as a mobile decapitation machine, right down to the sacks positioned to catch the heads as they roll off the bodies while the limo tears up the English countryside. Meanwhile, the goings-on inside the house are pretty rote — but there’s a wee bit of nudity to spice up the first half and the film’s cheerfully ludicrous attitude goes a long way. And complaining about the film’s cheap stereotypes would likely be missing the point.
Elite Entertainment released a nice version of this on DVD back in 1999; it’s now out of print.
Note: Since I wrote this review, Horror Hospital has been reissued on DVD by Dark Sky Films.
Crank: High Voltage
62/100Picks up where the previous film left off, this time with action hero Chev Chelios lighting out from his hospital bed to replace the plastic hunk of junk inside his chest with the real, beating heart that’s been stolen from him by gangsters. The result is, once again, simultaneously parody and quintessence of the contemporary action movie, pushed through a fuzzbox and amplified to the point of distortion.
I like the Neveldine/Taylor brand of mayhem well enough that I really wish so much of what’s going on here didn’t feel so, well, smarmy. It’s not the sex and the violence that I mind, but the targeted crassness — the joke about the horse cock is one thing, the outrageous racial and gender stereotypes another thing entirely. In some ways, this movie almost exists beyond prejudice, with its outsized offensiveness calling attention to itself sheerly for purposes of mockery. For all its super-charged action and good humor, I couldn’t completely dispel the whiff of chauvinism that hung about this thing, and it left me a little unsettled.
Drag Me to Hell
83/100I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie that has more sheer cinematic energy than Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. It’s in the cutting and the camera moves, but also in the cacophonous, claustrophobic staging — he manages to put you in that little cabin out in the woods with the zombie girl locked in the cellar and all hell about to break loose. (The flamboyantly comic Evil Dead II, with such flourishes as its flying-eyeball tracking shot, is generally more prized by movie buffs but, Bruce Campbell signature schtick aside, I much prefer the grim original.) The first two Spider-Man movies are fine, but Raimi’s traveled a long way in general from the kind of craziness that made his reputation and on which he built his career.
The Last House on the Left
Update 3/23/09: Via The House Next Door comes word that The Virgin Spring is available for free, legal online viewing.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the film or its reputation, let me give you an idea of just how disreputable the 1972 Wes Craven version of The Last House on the Left really is. I saw it in film school, in a horror-film class that was being taught by a professor who had stepped in at the last minute, after the one who had actually programmed the syllabus fell ill, so he was unfamiliar with some of the films that had been scheduled. The semester went pretty well went pretty well until the day we screened The Last House on the Left. The prof — a fine teacher and an expert in film in his own right — stood in front of the class afterward and declared that he had always considered himself a First Amendment absolutist. Until that day. Screening Last House for the first time, he said, had convinced him that there was a good case to be made for censorship. His argument was essentially that the film was sadistic and utterly worthless, the product of very small minds, a debasement of not just its cast and crew but of the audience members as well. I complicated matters somewhat by raising my hand and noting that The Last House on the Left was based on an Ingmar Bergman film, The Virgin Spring. As a defense of the film goes, I admit now that’s pretty weak sauce, but it’s what I had. And it worked, to a degree. I don’t think it necessarily changed his mind about the film, but it altered the tenor of discussion. Slightly.
Virgin Witch
This cut-rate release from the English studio Tigon, best known as a producer of second-tier horror (the terrific Witchfinder General and Blood on Satan’s Claw) and sexploitation (Au Pair Girls, which is actually a bit of fun, and the SF-themed Zeta One), has the makings of an enjoyable countryside romp through ritualism and witchcraft, but it suffers from a split personality. Half of the film plays as a surprisingly straightforward nudie picture, with sisters Christine and Betty (Ann and Vicki Michelle, respectively) appearing reliably in various states of partial and utter dishabille. And the other half plays as a somewhat ambitious psychological horror movie about young Christine, the title character, who first submits to and finally dominates a coven of witches holed up in the woods outside London.