80's Foreign Horror Part Twenty-Eight

DEADLINE

(1980)
Dir - Mario Azzopardi
Overall: MEH

Released anywhere between 1979 and 1984, (accounts vary), Deadline, (Anatomy of a Horror), is the sophomore effort from veteran Canadian-based writer/director Mario Azzopardi.  The meta premise has some legs to it, concerning a horror author who longs to be taken seriously and to create the ultimate work in terror, meanwhile his books are a hit and the movies that are based off of his books are a hit, yet he still pushes himself to elevate the ridiculed genre that he works in.  Inter-cutting with scenes from his movies and him writing those scenes, the cinematic vignettes are odd and unrelated, (a guy getting brutally mutilated by factory equipment, a blood-gushing shower, a woman having a horrific birth, a Nazi new wave punk band performing a lousy song, etc.), but the problem is a simple one; our protagonist is a raging douchebag.  He is yells at, hits, psychologically abuses, and neglects his kids, he yells at, hits, psychologically abuses, and neglects his wife, he is pretentious, he flies off at the handle when anyone criticizes him or gets annoyed by his efforts, and he garnishes zero sympathy for anyone in the audience.  Most of the people that he is surrounded by are equally unlikable, (a raving wife with a substance abuse problem, an unfeeling producer, a prima donna actor who hates her lines or lack of them, an assortment of cackling coked-out ladies that he brings home from a bar), but even when tragedy inevitable strikes and madness intensifies in the third act, it remains a tiring watch.

 

LUCKER THE NECROPHAGUS

(1986)

Dir - Johan Vandewoestijne

Overall: WOOF

The debut from Belgium filmmaker Johan Vandewoestijne, (who would not get behind the lens again until several decades after this), Lucker the Necrophagus, (Lucker), this was a lone slasher movie from the country, in such an era with far too many of them elsewhere.  It is also a nasty and primitive one at that, with Vandewoestijne throwing necrophilia into the mix and handling most levels of production in the true DIY spirit of independent exploitation movies that were made to shock and appall first and foremost.  Logic is immediately thrown out of the window as Nick Van Suyt's largely mute, captured title character wakes up with zero difficulty after getting drugged to a level that should have put him in a coma for a year, just so we can get to the reckless murdering and eventual corpse fucking.  The lack of story may appease trash fans who just want to laugh at the sick stuff, but the film is detrimentally padded and wretchedly paced since it is not merely one nasty kill/rape scene after the other.  Thankfully, a director's cut exists which trims down the moments of Suyt walking around endlessly to a more agreeable sixty-eight minutes, but its combination of sluggishness and depravity is only for the most patient of gore hounds.  It may suffice for everyone else to just acknowledge its existence and go watch Nekromantik or Angst instead.

ON THE SILVER GLOBE

(1988)

Dir - Andrzej Żuławski

Overall: MEH

Left abandoned for nearly ten years after the Polish government shut down production, Andrzej Żuławski's sprawling science fiction opus On the Silver Globe, (Na srebrnym globie), was eventually completed with narration over contemporary montage sequences to explain what was never shot, yet the word "explain" can only be used loosely at best.  This was a passion project for the famed filmmaker as it adapts his grand-uncle Jerzy Żuławski The Lunar Trilogy of novels, and it is a case of what could have been, since Żuławski was forced to make do with what he had.  Thankfully, most of the footage was in the can and it is unlikely that the results would have been any more conventionally decipherable had it been completed in the late 1970s, as intended.  From a sensory overload perspective, this is an impressive achievement, with striking costume design, mountain, beach, crumbling city, and salt mine location shooting, mobile wide-angle cinematography, and a score that touches upon classical, rock and ambient music.  Most of its intimidating, one-hundred and sixty-five minute running time is made up of aggressive rambling and incoherent dialog delivered by actors that seem to have only one setting which is raving insanity.  It is difficult to find any kind of footing either emotionally or intellectually here within a story that seems to be breaking down religion, society, and the ego of man, but it sure looks and sounds amazing.