Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

A mysterious guy gripping a Halloween mask and raving about how someone is going to kill everyone is admitted into a hospital. Shortly after that, some other guy comes in and pull his skull apart with his bare hands. From there he does the only thing one can do after doing something like that- he soaks himself in gasoline in his car and blows himself up.

The attending physician, Dr. Challis, decides to figure out what is going on, possibly because of natural curiosity (unlikely), possibly because the dead man's beautiful daughter is around (likely). They eventually track the single lead down and hilariously this leads them immediately and directly straight to the heart of an evil conspiracy involving magic Halloween masks.

This is the third of fourth time that I've watched this movie and my opinion keeps changing. I remember being disappointed the first time around because Michael Myers is not in the movie. Then after watching all the awful Halloween sequels that did have Michael in them, I thought Halloween III was a pretty decent change of pace. I liked it even more this time around; Halloween III is a pretty awesome 80s horror flick.

The absolute best thing about his movie is the character of Dr. Challis. This guy is totally sleazy, flirting with any woman who he comes into contact with. And he is a hilariously incompetent and uncaring father, blowing his visitation period with his kids to go investigate this spooky mystery like some kind of sleazy divorced version of the Scooby gang, except just one guy and no dog.

It's got a great synthesizer soundtrack by John Carpenter and it looks fantastoc, with plenty of wonderful shots (including the scene the totally awesome poster art was taken from). And the out-of-nowhere gore effects don't feel nearly as out of place as they did in Halloween II. One of the best Halloween movies, if not second best.

Incubus (1965)

Marc and his younger sister Arndis are spending some time in the woods of Nomen Tuum, where Marc can recover from his war injuries by drinking from the convenient fountain of youth thereabouts. Unfortunately for them there is a couple of succubi around who spend all their time corrupting men and they are hungry for the challenge the incorruptible Marc presents to them. Also, Arndis really enjoys staring at eclipses to the point of blindness, which only makes things more difficult for the siblings.

You can't talk about this movie without mentioning that it was filmed in the imaginary moon language of Esperanto. This is a language that was developed to be a sort of second universal language, though the fact that it sounds pretty much like various European languages all stuck together would have made things difficult for 20% of the world population, who speak primarily Chinese which has absolutely nothing to do with Esperanto. So why come up with a whole new manufactured language? Just use Chinese or something and write it with the roman alphabet so people don't have to learn those squiggly characters. This way you would start with 20% coverage! Esperanto dreams of 20% population coverage.

So Esperanto is a miserable failure of an idea, but how is Incubus? It's better in a lot of ways. For one, it has the only successful international manufactured language in it- that is, William Shatner. Whether it's because it is in the totally nonsensical fever dream language of Esperanto, or because Shatner hasn't developed his style fully, we can watch a toned down Shatner, who calmly and assuredly delivers honeyed words of poetry for us for the entire duration of the movie.

It's not a particularly interesting story. It's basically a medieval morality play on film, but the atmosphere is other-wordly and the goat that shows up at the end is really creepy. Goats are scary, what can I say. The cinematography is really outstanding as well, with nice shadows and an overall moody presentation. Unlike junky 50s scifi flicks, movies like Incubus really play to the strengths of black and white film making.

If you watch this movie with a bunch of pals you are going to be making Star Trek jokes all throughout at poor Mr. Shatner's expense so I would recommend instead to watch it on a rainy, gloomy morning when you have nothing much going on. Take a trip to Nomen Tuum and you might be surprised at what you find.

Blood Feast (1963)

Fuad Ramses, crackpot Egyptian caterer and occultist, is a man of many talents. Besides maintaining his catering business, he also has written a book about ancient weird religious rites ("Ancient Weird Religious Rites"), and runs a specialty beans and cans store. In his time off he mistakenly worships the goddess Ishtar, who is not Egyptian but Babylonian but hey close enough, right? He has a statue of her in the back of his store (it's a mannequin painted gold).

So this is what we are dealing with when we sit down to watch Blood Feast. It's only sixty-seven minutes long, but it is filled to the brim with awful acting, totally inept cinematography (most of the time the upper half of the screen is taken up by walls, with the actors down in the bottom half), and a script that was seemingly written by people who have never interacted with other people outside of hearing bits and pieces of conversations floating through the bars in the door of their padded cells.

Technically this movie should be absolutely unwatchable, but this is another one where every time I watch it I like it even more. It has a lot of things going for it. First of all, the gore shots are unbelievable considering the vintage of this movie. It's stuff you wouldn't expect to see until at least six years later. So this is an interesting mix of an early 60s thriller with the extreme gore that would become popular a decade later. Also, the colors are amazing: extremely saturated and lively the movie jumps off the screen at you. Finally, the soundtrack is awesome and sounds like a sixty-seven minutes jam session by the lady at the church on her organ.

So that's a recommendation I think.

The Revenge of Doctor X (1970)

Dr. Bragan is working on some important research for NASA when he is stricken down due to stress. To recover, he takes a trip to Japan to work on his insane theory: that humans evolved not from monkeys but from plants. He will prove this by turning a plant into a man, because science tells us that if one thing can be turned into another thing then we must conclude that the second thing necessarily used to be the first thing! The math is solid and so our movie begins.

Helping out Dr. Bragan is his lovely assistant Noriko and her hunchback, and some dogs. Dr. Bragan is basically the worst person ever. In every scene he is either hitting on Noriko in that creepy old-guy-who-thinks-he's-hip way, or he is totally flying off the handle for absolutely no reason at all. The movie even opens with him completely tearing into these guys and I never understood why he was so angry about everything.

This is pretty much your typical 1950s monster movie, complete with mad science and a final confrontation with a guy in a rubber monster suit at the end. And much like 1950 monster movies, you have about one hour of boring talking with everything that happens in the movie occurring in the last thirty minutes. Really the only thing differentiating this from, say, The Wasp Woman, is that The Revenge of Doctor X has a couple scenes of exploitative nudity.

Also, this movie takes place in Japan and surprisingly it has actual Japanese people in it speaking actual Japanese, and not a bunch of white folks squinting their eyes going "ahhhh sooooo domo arigato."

Other than the (comparatively) exotic setting, however, there is not much to recommend about this movie. The acting is bad all around and the movie is pretty lifeless all around. Also of concern is the fact that the title is a filthy lie. I don't think you could come up with a more inaccurate title for this movie, a movie which has neither a character named Doctor X nor any kind of revenge whatsoever in it. So this movie is lying to you right out of the gate, before you have even started watching it. That's like showing up for a first date and the person has not only lied to you about their name and also she isn't a human but is actually a robot dog.

The monster is cool, but you have to wait until nearly the end for the inevitable rampage and even then it's too brief and you end up feeling like you wasted an evening on a movie that would have been pretty unremarkable back in the late 50s, never mind 1970.

Happy Birthday to Me (1981)

1981. The world has run out of holidays on which to have murders on. The horror movie industry is on the brink of extinction... and then! A guy suggests that birthdays are technically, in a way, holidays too. Horror is saved! That is how this movie happened. Shortly after that the same guy realized horror movies can happen for any reason on any day, and then they all made zombie movies until the end of time.

I ordered this along with My Bloody Valentine and I enjoyed that movie quite a bit so it was a happy coincidence that, according to the DVD case, Happy Birthday to Me is "from the producers of My Bloody Valentine." Could it be? Another amazing Canadian horror movie from the 80s? Well, according to wikipedia, this is an "American slasher movie filmed in Canada" which I guess counts.

Ginny is a member of the Top 10 at Crawford Academy, which is a nasty group of elite jerk kids. How bad are they? They hassle old guys at the bar, they race over bridges... there is basically nothing these rotten to the core thrill-seekers won't do! Ginny seems like a nice girl, regardless of her vaguely unprofessional relationship with her psychiatrist, but I guess she is desperate to be seen as elite so there you go. Meanwhile there is a killer stalking everyone.

This movie is a little hard to follow. It keeps trying to throw you for a loop because much of the film is from Ginny's perspective and she is an unreliable narrator, since she is crazy. But instead of feeling awe at being expertly manipulated, you just feel kind of confused and then, at the end, let down. But at least they didn't just pull the old "the killer is this kid they picked on!" thing that so many other, weaker, slashers have.

I guess my problem with this movie is it isn't Canadian enough. Where is the insanity of something like The Pit, where you are constantly on the verge of losing your mind as you watch? Where are the macho low-key Canadian guys drinking beer and getting into polite brawls from My Bloody Valentine? The twist at the end that invalidates the entire movie like in Rock 'n Roll Nightmare? None of that stuff is in this movie and it suffers for it.

The murders are not even bizarre enough to remember really, regardless of what the poster claims. I can come up with more bizarre murders just looking around the room! Eating a television to death! Buried alive in pens! A bunch of bookcases combine into a giant mummy and then roll you up like a tube of toothpaste, causing your brains to explode from the top of your head!

In conclusion, exhaust the library of Canadian horror movies until you tackle this one. It's a good way to cleanse the palate before watching some good old American slashers.

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Two miners go into a mine, one of them takes off her miner suit (surprise! she's a lady) and gets ready to get intimate with her coworker but he sees a heart tattoo on her chest, flies into a rage and kills her! Happy Valentine's Day!

Some time later, a bunch of manly men come back from the mine and are doing various manly things in a bar: playing that game where you put your hand on a table and stab the spaces between your fingers with a knife as fast as you can, drinking beer, sexually harassing waitresses, and planning Valentine's Day dances! The old bartender warns them not to, as there is a crazy miner that really hates Valentine's Day dances- or anything resembling a dance, like a party or a hoedown or a get-together- and if you have one, he is just gonna kill you. All the miners laugh off his advice and drink more beer and let's PAR-TAY!

Why does the miner hate Valentine's Day dances so much? Well, there was a dance and his supervisors left him and his crew out in the mines and there was an explosion and everyone died, except this miner!

This is probably the worst setup for a slasher movie ever. I mean, Jason was left to drown by uncaring camp counselors. Freddy was burned to death. The guy in the Burning... was also burned, but only really badly and not to death. The miner should probably be thankful really. He wasn't even hideously burned!

But you know, this is slasher and it's a really good one, so that is all the setup you really need. All the miners and their women seem to be in their late 20s at the very least, though that doesn't stop the sheriff from referring to them as "bunch of kids" a few times. The main character is extremely obnoxious- he apparently just left one day to try to make it out in the city or whatever and failed miserably and now is back doing backbreaking mine work and just expects the girl he abandoned to come back to him, regardless of the fact that she has moved on to some other manly guy. So the first guy spends most of the movie sulking and finally starts a fight with the new boyfriend and gets totally wrecked, which was surprising and awesome.

There are two things that separate this from any other slasher from the early 80s. First, it is extremely brutal! I got to watch the uncut version and I was a little shocked. There is even some totally out of nowhere and unlikely Italian exploitation eyeball violence! Second, the small mining town setting is really interesting. The last part of the movie was shot in an actual mine and it's a really great location for a slasher movie final chase.

Overall a really great horror flick and well worth seeing if you've seen all the Friday the 13th movies and are looking for something around the same time, but really violent and from Canada.

Country Blue (1973)

Bobby Lee Dixon has just been released from prison and after doing some accounting he figures there is no way he can, on his meager auto mechanic salary, escape brutal Southern life with his girlfriend Ruthie, especially considering she is married to a rich guy. So he does the only thing you can do in that situation- he gets an education and becomes an astronaut. Just kidding, he robs a bank and things go from bad to worse. Can Bobby Lee and Ruthie escape the mind-rending terror of the Country Blue?

Sadly there is no monster in this movie, just a bunch of poor people and one monkey in a cage in the middle of nowhere for no reason at all. Maybe the people shooting the last movie on the set they used here forget their monkey when they cleaned up.

It's not a bad way to waste ninety minutes, but it is basically what you'd expect. You get some nice nature photography of swamps and stuff and the movie doesn't really pick up until nearly the end where is suddenly gets really exploitative really suddenly, filled with shootouts and corrupt sweaty cops and tough as nails ladies.

The ending totally comes out of nowhere, so that is something to look forward to depending on how you feel about sudden twist endings. When it comes to drive-in fare like this, it only makes the movie better so I was cheering the whole way.

I couldn't find a poster for this (was it even released in the theaters?) so I made my own. Judging from this drawing, you might think the movie looks a little bit like Southern E.T. in a convertible. If so, mission accomplished.

Super Mario Bros. (1993)

Two plumbers, Mario Mario and Luigi Mario, jump into a parallel dimension (The Mushroom Kingdom, where everyone has evolved from dinosaurs instead of monkeys) to save Luigi's girlfriend Daisy. But they will have to contend with King Koopa (Dennis Hopper!!), who rules the Mushroom Kingdom with an iron fist and has plans to merge his dimension with the human Earth, thus taking over the world!

There's not much that can be said about this movie. It's a dark movie for kids who like Mario and dinosaurs, so of course all the hip gamer adults hate this because Mario doesn't hit blocks for coins and doesn't jump on a flagpole at the end of each scene, his height on the pole determining how many points are added to his score. So yes, this movie has very little to to with the painstakingly detailed mythos of Super Mario Brothers and if you are looking for a 100 minute film about your memories of playing Super Mario Bros. when you were eight years old, you should probably watch the end of The Wizard instead.

But here in cave of newtmonkey I don't review movies based on how close they are to video games. I review movies based on how violent they are, or how much exploitative nudity there is. In other words, the ideas they contain and what they say about the human condition.

Super Mario Bros. is interesting because of how dark and crazy the dystopia ruled by Koopa is. There is mucous-like fungus growing over everything, and society is slowly being driven insane, possibly by genetic deterioration. There are no resources left so everything is dirty and awful and all the cars are hooked into some kind of electric grid. The entire planet except for one small city is a barren wasteland. People eat bug sandwiches. I could go on and on. It's a pretty well-developed world, much more developed anyway than any of the Super Mario Bros. games.

So this could have stood up there with Return to Oz and The Neverending Story and The Goonies as a classic dark fantasy for kids that we in our 30s would all be flipping out for all the time in fits of nostalgia, except for the fact that they paced it for the video game generation. Scenes last mere seconds, just long enough to build up a quip-worthy situation. Mario and Luigi's relationship is just a means to deliver groan worthy sarcastic one-liners back and forth. It's never funny, just distressing.

On top of that, the ending sets us up for a sequel. I found it a little arrogant but in hindsight I could laugh while seeing what they were trying to do. Yeah, good luck with that guys. This movie will surely be a hit! Maybe in the dinosaur dimension.

Shaolin Deadly Kicks (1977)

Eight guys (the "Dragons") steal a "treasure map" that looks kind of like a novelty chocolate bar and then split it up among them and go their separate ways, vowing to come together again when the time is right to claim the treasure. Unfortunately for them, super-kicky policeman Fong Yee is on the case and he definitely does not want these guys to get their treasure! So in other words, this is your typical police movie, if your typical police movie was one where the cop went anonymously around kicking people utterly to death unless they give him some treasure map.

This seems like a pretty good kung fu flick, but I don't really have the depth of experience yet to say for sure. It was certainly technically a lot better than Kung Fu Arts (even though there is no Uncle Monkey in this one), and the fight scenes were pretty excellent although there were some cases of ridiculous looking wire work acted in reverse and several of the fights were way too stop-and-go and overly choreographed for my tastes. But man, can that one guy kick really well!

The version I watched was of course dubbed in English and that made much of the movie hilarious so it was hard to take parts of it seriously. All the women sound like Beaker from the Muppets, and most of the guys end up sounding like guys from black and white gangster flicks, since they have to often breathlessly fill out long stretches of dialog. There is one absolutely hilarious part where one of the Dragons, who is living a quiet life of retirement with his young daughter, is trying to assassinate Fong Yee, but every time he pulls out his assassinatin' knife, no matter where he is, you hear his daughter shout out "FONG YEE! OH FONG YEE!" and she runs over and he has to go hide.

So between all of that kicking and the funny voices there is a lot to recommend about Shaolin Deadly Kicks! One of the better cheapo dubbed kung fu flicks I have seen.

*poster downloaded from kungfucinema.com

Army of Darkness (1993)

At the end of Evil Dead II the hero, Ash, was pulled into some kind of time portal along with the monster he was trying to banish. He ends up back in the 14th century, surrounded by men of King Arthur (obviously not the King Arthur, since that guy- if he existed- lived and died centuries before this), who mistake him for a soldier of their sworn enemy, Henry the Red. Ash and Henry's men are chained up and sent to their deaths in a pit where Arthur keeps some zombies, but since Ash has developed godlike battle skills thanks to his hour of training he got back in the cabin in the previous movie he is able to pretty easily destroy the zombies and escape. People begin to trust him and he is told that there is a formula in the Necronomicon, the book of the dead, that can send him home. Not really concerned with anything other than going home, Ash heads off to retrieve the book!

Army of Darkness is a very entertaining movie. It's funny and ridiculous and has some very charming old-fashioned special effects, like adorable stop motion skeleton warriors and trick photography.

But what kind of movie is it exactly? It is the third Evil Dead movie, but shares little in common with either of the previous films. If anything, it feels a lot like an adventure or sword & sorcery movie. And not a particularly brutal one at that. It's certainly not scary. In fact, cut some scenes a little short and you could show this movie to children, who would definitely find the skeletons cool rather than creepy.

Stylistically, you won't see any of the amazing camerawork from the first movie in this one. Honestly, the movie looks a little cheap overall, which is surprising considering the budget this movie had compared with Evil Dead. Between the lack of violence/gores/scares and the somewhat cheap look, watching this movie often feels like watching a really good made-for-TV feature, which is a huge letdown considering how epic Evil Dead II felt.

Bruce Campbell's Ash is an interesting character, but as a character he is turned up to 11 this time around, and although most of the time he's hilarious, sometimes you feel like they were trying way too hard to make him into this kind of sarcastic superhero. I think the best version of this character was definitely from Evil Dead II, where he was played more subtly. The subtle humor mixed with the gross-out gore scenes hit the mark exactly and worked so well, so it's a bit of a shame that they had to go so over the top with Army of Darkness.

Make no mistake, it is a worthy sequel. It's just quite a step down from two excellent films and I couldn't help but feel let down by it. Some of the jokes fall flat and without the edge provided by the suspense and absolute terror from the first film, or the gross out gore gags from the second, I was left kind of feeling a little awkward about the whole movie.