The Subspecies Series Part One

SUBSPECIES

(1991)

Dir - Ted Nicolaou

Overall: MEH

 

Kicking things off with Angus Scrimm looking like an absolute clown in a ridiculous afro wig, Subspecies is the first of many in the Full Moon Pictures direct-to-video series.  Shot in Budapest and making fine use out of gothic castles, local actors, and crumbling ruins, it scratches that throwback Hammer itch with an enhanced level of authenticity.  Anders Hove's long-haired/long-fingered undead baddie is appropriately hammy, plus his make-up is good and striking, even if he is the only vampire here out of a few that has a monstrous appearance.  Sadly, the rest of this production leaves something to be desired.  The stop-motion doll-sized demons from Tibor Takács' The Gate are both useless and look appalling, the pacing is meandering, the plot is largely uneventful, the cheap keyboard score plays with full bombast even when characters are simply walking around and looking at things, and most of the actors besides Hove seem bored to be there.  One could be surprised that such mediocre silliness launched a franchise, but coming from Charles Band whose production credits are over four-hundred titles deep, well, what is there to be surprised about?

 

BLOODSTONE: SUBSPECIES 2

(1993)

Dir - Ted Nicolaou

Overall: MEH

 

Shot concurrently with the following year's Bloodlust: Subspecies 3, Bloodstone: Subspecies 2 picks up right where Subspecies left off and is a typical inconsistent Full Moon Productions hack job.  On the plus side, director Ted Nicolaou and cinematographer Vlad Paunescu once again have an excellent eye for Gothic detail.  The Budapest catacombs look fantastic, everything is back-lit for maximum gloomy atmosphere, and the make-up effects still make Anders Hove look like a Goth-rock Nosferatu from hell.  We also get a new character in Hove's mother, (simply and ridiculously referred to as "Mummy"), who could pass as the Crypt Keeper's even more gnarly-looking girlfriend.  There is little else to recommend, since the story retreads events that happened in the first movie as Denice Duff's sister Melanie Shatner arrives on the scene and slowly and boringly comes to realize that her sibling has inadvertently joined the legions of the undead.  The film is clearly padded at regular intervals to get eighty-six minutes worth of content on the screen, with the opening act being particularly, (and unintentionally), hilarious as both Hove and Duff nonchalantly take their time doing things like crying, mugging, walking around, not grabbing the bloodstone of the title when they easily can, not leaving a place of danger during the daylight when they easily can, and awkwardly dusting off some bones so that they can sleep on a stone slab.

BLOODLUST: SUBSPECIES 3

(1994)

Dir - Ted Nicolaou

Overall: MEH

 

Ain't no vamp mug at the camera the way Andres Hove's Radu does.  Bloodlust: Subspecies 3 once again picks up where its predecessor left off, giving us a montage recap and a lengthy opening credit sequences just to stretch things out long enough.  In this respect, it is more of the same shit, different Subspecies movie.  Melanie Shatner is still trying to rescue her now fully undead sister from the vampire clutches of Hove and his "Mummy" Pamela Gordon, the bloodstone is still a coveted item, there is still swelling keyboard music playing throughout the whole thing, the grisly makeup effects are excellent, (as is the Gothic on location shooting), and it still results in competent yet tedious boredom.  While these films deliberately adhere to the Hammer style of churning out horror sequels without breaking the formula, they also suffer from such adherence.  In other words, one could skip any of these and get the full experience by simply watching one of them and/or reading a plot synopsis.  They get to the eighty minute mark and look more professional than their modest budget would allude to, but they also lack memorable set pieces, have zero stakes since everyone keeps returning to undead life again and again, and take themselves too seriously to laugh at.

1990s Italian Horror Part Six

METAMORPHOSIS
(1990)
Dir - George Eastman
Overall: MEH

The second of only two directorial efforts from actor George Eastman/Luigi Montefiori, Metamorphosis, (Regenerator, Re-Animator 2), is your typical shot-in-America/Italian conglomerate of better and more professionally done genre offerings. Namely, this one takes a little bit of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, David Cronenberg's The Fly, Ken Russell's Altered States, and a dash of Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator into a cliche-ridden plot where a dashing university scientist is hellbent on completing his genetics-tweaking experiments no matter how many of his crotchety superiors try to shut him down.  Everyone on screen takes the material seriously, giving it a sincere tone that of course jives awkwardly with the minuscule budget and how dopey the material is.  This is the type of story that by the turn of the 90s should have been played for laughs, but there is no intentional humor to be found.  There are a handful of "bad movie" chuckles scattered around though, and the final set piece where the culmination of Gene LeBrock's transformation is finally unveiled is so embarrassingly stupid that it needs to be seen to be believed.

 

NOTTE PROFONDA

(1991)

Dir - Fabio Salerno

Overall: MEH

 

After cranking out home movies for a decade, Italian DIY filmmaker Fabio Salerno made his only feature-length one Notte profonda, (Deep Night), since his follow-up and final work L'altra dimensione was merely three shorts cobbled together.  This is a commendable zero dollar production, if only in a practical sense.  Shot on 16 mm in what looks like a single apartment, Salerno pulls off some nifty special effects like a claymation key dissolving, a guy's face melting, another face appearing out of a wall, people getting dragged across the floor by a noose, and various bold colors to help illuminate things in proper otherworldly Mario Bava fashion.  The story's grasp does not come anywhere near matching the non-existent budget or Salerno's modest talents from behind the lens, plus the nightmarish set pieces are few and far between, which makes all sixty-eight minutes feel much longer.  Still, Salerno gets an A for effort and with proper financing and an experienced director, something could have been made out of such a story where a comic book artist coming across a tiny pyramid that unlocks a demon dimension, (or something).

 

CREATURES FROM THE ABYSS
(1994)
Dir - Alvaro Passeri
Overall: WOOF
 
Special effects man-turned director Alvaro Passeri takes his first stab behind the lens with the hare-brained monster romp Creatures from the Abyss, (Plankton).  Filmed in Miami, Florida with a cast of nobodies who are dubbed as terribly as you would imagine, it has some bikini babes, an insufferable mimbo, and a nerd (because he wears glasses and makes accurate scientific guesses since his character read the script), who come across an abandoned yacht with human possessing sea creatures or something.  These unlikable saps do intelligent things like willingly split up, taste stuff in jars that are in a lab, get excited about selling all of the presumed drugs that are on board, eat the weird fish that they find, and plan to throw orgies on the ghost ship instead of being concerned with why it is a ghost ship in the first place.  It takes until the forty-two minute mark until we get a hilariously stupid aquatic critter attack, and being made by a guy whose career was in visual effects work, the results here are on par with James Nguyen's Birdemic.  Thankfully, we eventually get a memorable sex scene where the horny scumbag turns into a slimy fish monster in mid-orgasmic thrust.  There are other bizarre details like a flirty female computer voice that seems to run various high-tech bathroom appliances as if it is under the influence of poltergeists, but the tone is all over the place, the dialog is atrocious, and the plot is stupid enough to constitute as a hate crime.

1990s Italian Horror Part Five

THE CRAWLERS

(1991)

Dir - Fabrizio Laurenti/Joe D'Amato

Overall: WOOF

Filmed in the same Utah town as Claudio Fragasso's infamous Troll 2 and serving as yet another unofficial Italian/American installment to a series of films that have nothing to do with each other, The Crawlers, (Troll 3, Creepers, Contamination .7), is a killer tree movie that meanders around too much to keep its schlock straight.  A town is besieged by radioactive foliage, but of course the schlubby police force is too lazy to get out of their chairs to deal with it, let alone believe it is even happening.  At least that is our first assumption since Vince O'Neil's fluffy sheriff also tells a bunch of young adults that they must be on drugs when they rush in to report a dead body.  As it turns out, he is probably in on the toxic waste dumping conspiracy, either that or the script is too hackneyed to understand what a cop's bare minimum duties are.  Chalk it up to an Italians-doing-American thing then.  The ADR dubbing is distractingly bad at best, (Though when is it not?), and close to nothing exciting happens until about an hour in when some tree roots stab through the stupid sheriff's fat stupid face.  Everywhere else, it is just meandering drama, dim-witted characters, and a plot that tries and fails to make the unexciting exciting.

L'ALTRA DIMENSIONE

(1992)

Dir - Fabio Salerno

Overall: MEH

The final full-length of sorts from underground filmmaker Fabio Salerno was L'Altra dimensione, (The Other Dimension); an anthology of three shorts whose only narrative through-line is that they each focus on a loser with an unhealthy attachment to a woman, to say the least.  "Delirium" features a guy who decides that the only way to cure his depression after his girlfriend dumps him is to drug her and rape her, the second "Mortal Instinct" has someone who gets his female obsession to live with him by way of occult magic, and the third and longest "Eros and Thanatos" features another hopeless romantic who feels that the best course of action after his girlfriend's suicide is to eat her corpse over several days.  All shot on grainy Super 8 film with non actors in presumably the apartments of Salerno and his friends, this is textbook, no budget DIY movie-making.  The visuals are mostly as ugly as the subject matter, but Salerno pulls off some garish make-up effects and even some bold color gels to enhance the dreary nightmare vibe that he is going for.  It is still bottom-barrel stuff that is horrendously slow and difficult to stay invested in, but the low-key tone is appreciated, plus it makes for some fringe exploitation that is not good, but is at least singular.

 

MOZART È UN ASSASSINO

(1999)

Dir - Sergio Martino

Overall: MEH

The to-date final giallo from Sergio Martino, Mozart è un assassino, (Mozart Is a Murderer), goes through all of the motifs of a clandestine masked killer making threatening phone calls and leaving deliberate clues, pointing at red herrings left and right along the way.  On the one hand, the made-for-TV presentation neuters the sleaze since there is no nudity and the bloodshed is less egregious than what was allowed in the genre's heyday, but we still have exploitative elements like sex scenes, drug dealing, and pedophilia, so it is hardly a PG-rated affair.  Despite the late 90s low-budget aesthetic which is not conducive to the more flashy cinematic style that Martino had used when he made his most famous giallos, he and Francesco Contaldo's script still manages to keep the momentum going for the first two acts.  After a couple of bodies pile up and detective Enzo Decaro gets taken off the case and his therapist girlfriend Daniela Scarlatti finds out that she is pregnant, the pacing lulls and leads way to a far-fetched finish where the killer manages to easily do away with a slew of armed guards yet has a clumsy time finishing off one last would-be female victim.

1990s Spanish Horror Part Four

IMMORTAL SINS
(1991)
Dir - Hervé Hachuel
Overall: MEH

The second of only two full-length films directed by producer Hervé Hachuel, Immortal Sins, (Veil of Dreams, Vengeance with a Kiss), is a contemporary set throwback, set in a Gothic location and involving a long condemned witch who works her mojo on any men in her accuser's family line.  These kind of formulaic tales write themselves, and Thomas McKelvey Cleaver and Beverly Gray's screenplay has nothing clever to add to a long-established cinematic mythos of unsuspecting city folks moving out into the European countryside only to get besieged by supernatural forces that are beyond their control.  There are some steamy nightmare sex scenes between Not-Wings Hauser Cliff De Young and Shari Shattuck, the latter playing the scheming succubus lady who is posing as an interior decorator because she has to pose as something.  This was one of many B-level productions from Roger Corman's Concorde-New Horizons to be shot overseas and with a local crew, and the "anything to save a buck" approach captures some of the remote Spanish countryside, not to mention the dark, fire-lit castle setting.  The film is atmospherically on point, but the story is a snore and it only comes alive within the last five or so minutes when we get some hearts being ripped out, some monster make-up, and a pool of water erupting into flames.

 

THE NIGHT OF THE EXECUTIONER

(1992)

Dir - Paul Naschy

Overall: MEH

If one wanted to be kind, they can see Paul Naschy's penultimate directorial full-length The Night of the Executioner, (La noche del ejecutor), as a fun action revenge parody, but it is more likely that it is simply a hilariously out-of-touch and ridiculous vanity project from a man who has done far better.  This is Naschy's low-end version of Death Wish, and it is presented in an identical style to his films from a decade and some change earlier, dating it right out of the gate.  Scenes start with zoom-outs, characters sit around talking in boring wide-shots, there is hardly any atmospheric lighting or cinematography, expository dialog is never disguised as anything but, and it has a lackadaisical pace that the early 90s were hardly on about.  Besides an unflinching rape and murder scene in the beginning to get things going, the rest of the action is clumsy and downright embarrassing, with Naschy usually just slowly shooting people instead of coming up with outrageous comeuppance kill scenes.  Playing a rich doctor, Naschy gives himself a humdrum training montage, learns how to throw knives and use guns with pinpoint accuracy in a manner of hours or days, literally walks headfirst right through a goddamn glass window, and picks off the criminals one at a time in order for them to formulate a plan and murder more of his loved ones.  There is plenty of other nonsense like cars exploding from a single gunshot yards away and badly-hung Nazi flags because evil, but if one can withstand how sluggish the majority of it is, there are definitely some things left over to laugh at.

 

KILLER TONGUE

(1996)

Dir - Alberto Sciamma

Overall: WOOF

A loud, aggressive, disgusting, and insufferably obnoxious trash "comedy", Killer Tongue, (La lengua asesina), is the first full-length from music video director Alberto Sciamma, and you can tell.  Edited at a dizzying rate, (coherence be damned), it cruises along like a jackrabbit on a drug-fueled quest towards self destruction.  An alien life form, (or something), crashes into the dingy home of ex-bank robber Melinda Clarke, who is awaiting the release of her lover from the clutches of Robert Englund's "prison" which is just him screaming at a couple of inmates in the middle of the desert where he makes them do torturous amounts of manual labor.  Clarke's body gets overtaken by the killer appendage of the title that turns her into a Goth rock dominatrix and makes her act like she is about to self-combust.  Oh, and the tongue talks, turns her dogs into drag queens, and a nun shows up with supernatural powers while more people scream, piss, fondle each other, and scream some more.  It is such an alarmingly hare-brained mess that its filthy, violent, profanity-ridden, bizarre, and gross-out trajectory has to be intentional.  What audience this dung heap could possibly be for is another question since it goes so hard and so fast in so many wild directions that it seems more like a parody of grimy exploitation movies than one that has any clue as to what makes some of those movies enduring.

1990s Mexican Horror Part Three

EL TEATRO DEL HORROR

(1991)

Dir - Pedro Galindo III
Overall: WOOF

Another in a string of terrible genre excursions from filmmaker Pedro Galindo III, El teatro del horror, (Theater of Horror), bypasses the slasher formula for a more convoluted and monotonous tale about two college students who try to rid a theater of a curse, only to have that go awry and end up causing their professor to become a walking corpse with a decapitated head.  Some other characters eventually show up who are about as funny as wet asparagus, and Rafael Sánchez Navarro's scenery chewing must be seen to be believed.  The first act is atrociously paced, but things do not get much better from there, only more loud and stupid.  Set almost exclusively at the crumbling Teatro Colonial in Mexico City, Galindo III loads it up with fog and cheap synth music to create a macabre atmosphere, but the tone is more ridiculous than creepy.  It eventually settles into lots of yelling, running around, talking, walking around, and repetitive dialog that advances nothing until lots of stuff catches on fire.  Besides Navarro mugging it up with a detached head, no other supernatural set pieces occur, and the piss pour budget wears itself embarrassingly on its sleeve.

PERSECUCIÓN INFERNAL

(1992)

Dir - Paco del Toro

Overall: WOOF

The obscure relic Persecución infernal, (Infernal Persecution), from Mexican director Paco del Toro is in line with most of the genre fare stemming from the country around the era as far as non-existent production values are concerned, but it is a more curious watch since it comes off like a cross between an embarrassing horror film and a Christian public service announcement.  Because it is noticeably so low on budget, (the laughably cheap title font, pedestrian cinematography, most scenes playing out in continuous takes to insure maximum boredom, etc), the movie is loaded with dialog in place of action, and a significant portion of that dialog is dedicated to characters explaining the glory of Jesus and how it is all that that is required to defeat evil.  We even get a sequence where someone plays "Stairway to Heaven" backwards to sincerely suggest that ole wives tale that it contains a hidden demonic message.  Such Satanic panic nonsense is adorably dated, and little information exists as to the origins or intentions of such a film, but it seems more like poorly executed exploitation with a half-assed religious moral undercurrent than something that was sanctioned by any church organization.  In any event, this is talky, lifeless, and dull stuff made with no flare whatsoever, so unless you are simply hankering for some early 90s mullets and lots of scenes of people in acting class, stay away.

EL CHUPACABRAS

(1996)

Dir - Gilberto de Anda

Overall: WOOF

A non-union Mexican equivalent X-Files done with Telemundo production values. El chupacabras would be hilariously wretched if not for how insultingly boring it is.  The problem here stems from the obvious piss-pour finances that were at the disposal of prolific director Gilberto de Anda and his crew.  Which is to say that the title monsters are merely talked about instead of shown, and boy are they talked about.  Sprawling three different countries and just as many pairs of characters, everyone in this universe starts investigating the mysterious goings-ons of the folklore creatures, and it all leads them to a cave where we finally get a few quick glimpses of them hanging back in the shadows within the last five minutes of the running time before our macho heroes blow the cave up and run away from it in slow motion, as one does when dynamite is ignited.  There is no humor, no clever dialog, no enticing kill scenes, no atmospheric cinematography, and this cannot be stressed enough, no goddamn chupacabras until their aforementioned "blink and you'll miss them" appearance at the very end.  Instead, we have big strong burly men with mustaches, women flirting with them, and everyone talking about stuff that either has nothing to do with anything or would be far more exciting to actually see on screen.

1990s Foreign Horror Part Twelve

REVENGE OF THE RADIOACTIVE REPORTER

(1990)

Dir - Craig Pryce

Overall: MEH

Also shot in Toronto and released the same year as Darkman, Revenge of the Radioactive Reporter can be looked at as the no-budget and lame comedy cousin to Sam Raimi's bombastic superhero classic.  This was the first film from producer/director/co-writer Craig Pryce, and he takes a noble stab at Troma-esque exploitation, utilizing some ridiculous gore as well as the same avenging anti-hero gag that The Toxic Avenger did, except the tasteless sleaze is toned-down in place of embarrassing one-liners and hackneyed characters.  The plot is as straightforward as it gets, with David Scammell's dopey title reporter uncovering fraudulent activity from the most comically evil toxic waste corporation on planet Earth, confronting the CEOs, and then getting pushed into a vat of radioactive goo that leaves him looking like Freddy Krueger on his quest for revenge.  It is plenty violent and mean-spirited, but Pryce and screenwriter David Wiechorek's comedic chops are lacking, so the movie becomes exasperating with its embarrassing, lazy, juvenile, and icky gags.

 

DELICATESSEN

(1991)

Dir - Jean-Pierre Jeunet/Marc Caro

Overall: GOOD

 

For their first full-length collaboration Delicatessen, writer/directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro craft a wet, monochrome, earthy, metallic, and stylized dystopian black comedy where jobs are scarce, food is scarcer, and at least one guy and his despondent tenants are willing to let some hapless saps get lured and butchered to keep meat on the table.  An underground terrorist organization of vegetarians also shows up, and it all culminates with a destructive showdown that turns an apartment building into a battleground where a nice former clown is just trying to get away from a maniac landlord who wants to slice and dice him.  At the heart of the whole thing is a sweet and blossoming love story, giving the whole film an absurdist tone that is matched by an impressive production design and delightful performances.  It never goes detrimentally heavy in any direction, expertly riding a line of goofy and grown-up, with a central theme of mankind's humanity clashing with its desperation and the former thankfully triumphing over the latter.  The duo's equally cinéma du look-tinged follow-up The City of Lost Children makes a logical companion piece to this and was even more Terry Gilliam inspired and inventive, but their work here is just as strong and enduring.

 

GOODBYE, 20TH CENTURY!

(1998)

Dir - Darko Mitrevski/Aleksandar Popovski

Overall: MEH

The full-length debut from the Macedonian filmmaking team of Darko Mitrevski and Aleksandar Popovski, Goodbye, 20th Century!, (Zbogum na dvaesettiot vek!), is a rare post apocalyptic anthology movie for its country, as well as one that defies genre classification.  Part absurdist comedy, part arthouse, part Mad Max knock-off, part musical, part surreal nightmare, even part Christmas movie, it gets by on its singularity more than anything else.  The plot is wildly unfocused, mostly lingering on the dystopian future segment where a bunch of nomads try to kill an immortal.  It then spends a mere three minutes on a turn of the century one where a pair of siblings marry each other and are immediately killed, closing out with a guy in a Santa Claus costume who wanders into an oddball wake before a punk rock guy and his almost topless girlfriend crash it, play Sid Vicious' rendition of "My Way", and then everyone gets murdered.  There may be a semblance of meaning lurking behind a barrage of images and set pieces that seem to bask in a juvenile sense of profoundness, but it all gets lost in translation.  Eye-popping and occasionally humorous, its wacky for the sake of being wacky aesthetic jives curiously with a heavy tone at times, all of which seems to lead to some death of civilization theme that is of course merely speculative.

1990s Foreign Horror Part Eleven

THE BURNING MOON

(1992)
Dir - Olaf Ittenbach
Overall: MEH

If hardened gore hounds are not already desensitized enough when going into Olaf Ittenbach's second feature The Burning Moon, then they certainly will be by the film's merciless end.  Another mindless excess of juvenile brutality for the mere sake of it, this one is strung together by flimsy means as Ittenbach himself plays a schlubby punk who disrespects adults, throws fists at other punks as well as his parents, and is still somehow allowed to babysit his kid sister who he tells horrendous bed time stories to before stabbing her and then mutilating himself because who cares.  An anthology movie of sorts, the bloodshed is rampant and hilariously primitive, yet here lies the film's charm.  It is another SOV crapfest, (as was his also cartoonishly gory debut Black Past), so we are talking DIY exploitation of the most bare-bones variety here.  In this respect, Ittenbach can be applauded for his reach and the means in which he goes about achieving it, by hook or by crook.  Sadly, the eighty-six minute running time feels just as excessive as the blood-splatter, and things drag along for long portions, which makes the whole thing snore-inducing since the story is moronic and the gore is so ridiculously stupid that it is merely worth a courtesy chuckle or two.

 

THE DARK

(1993)

Dir - Craig Pryce

Overall: GOOD

The second and last full-length from director Craig Pryce before he would work almost exclusively in television until the present day, The Dark is a Canadian giant rat monster movie that is not to be confused with the small handful of other horror films that are also called The Dark.  As far as low-budget creature features go, this one is unremarkable, yet it is also not horrible.  It has a convincing enough puppet monster that is wisely kept in the shadows and shown in closeups when it does appear, several on purpose and accidental comedic beats that hit their mark, plus a solid cast that includes stoic Canadian tough guy Stephen McHattie, everyone's favorite American tough guy Brion James, and a young Neve Campbell who is tough enough as a police officer that gets caught up in the big rodent-hunting mayhem.  The plot cruises along while sacrificing logical plot points, (which there are precious few of), plus various characters get on the same page with little convincing, making this is actually a pleasant exception as opposed to everyone being annoying and arguing with each other for ninety-minutes.  Dumb but enjoyable, it stays in its schlocky lane.

THE UGLY

(1997)

Dir - Scott Reynolds

Overall: MEH

New Zealand writer/director Scott Reynolds' full-length debut The Ugly has an ambitious presentation, delving into the troubled mind of a serial killer with a traumatic backstory that is right out of the cliche book.  The formulaic tropes extend beyond Paolo Rotondo's origins of having an abusive mother, an absent father who is villainized, school bullies who endlessly torment him, and being dyslexic, since the narrative unfolds with a famed psychiatrist interviewing him in an under-equipped insane asylum where the orderlies look and act like bigger scumbags than he is.  There are stylistic flourishes though, such as Rebecca Hobbs's psychiatrist physically interjecting herself into the flashbacks, Rotondo's facial features bouncing between normal and severely deformed, the blood being tar-like and black, and quick cuts of his pale and ghostly "visitors".  As sad puppy as Rotondo presents himself, his actions are too deplorable to sympathize with and the whole thing eventually deteriorates into loud, aggressive, and implausible schlock.  This is a shame since Reynolds shows enough restraint in other areas, but the B-movie trappings eventually win out in the end.