Zombie Self-Defense Force

Zombie Self-Defense Force is the first of Naoyuki Tomomatsu's trio of zombie productions. I've had this movie for probably six months before I actually got around to watching it, but now that I have I think I just might be intrigued enough to look into those other two. That's not to say that it's a great film (it's not), but in this case I think that this trainwreck turned out to be hilarious enough for repeat viewings, from several angles.

The movie starts out with a ridiculous CGI spaceship being seen over Fujiyama, Japan. After a drawn out display of every single Japanese citizen's reactions to the U.F.O. the thing crashes, bathing the surrounding landscape in an electric green light.


As luck would have it, the Kibara platoon of the Japanese Self-Defense Force is in the forest already, on a "routine mission."

When we meet them they're just arriving at a corpse hanging from a tree. They see the spaceship, but decide to take care of the body before heading out to the crash site. While they're digging a grave for her, the dead woman suddenly springs back to life as a green-skinned zombie.

Also we find out the forest is haunted by ghost soldiers...

Wow. Things are really picking up fast now, and it hardly ever slows down again. We get one ridiculously gory gag after another as we plod along a truly skeletal plot. Essentially if you were to take zombies, aliens, ghosts, robots, and volcano eruptions (and the rest of this post's tag list), and come up with some ridiculous way to string them all together and throw them on screen in the span of 45 minutes or so, then you'd pretty much have the plot of Zombie Self-Defense Force... so long as you sprinkled in a healthy dose of sword fighting and arterial spray. With that being said, this isn't exactly a plot-driven movie anyway. As a cheap romp through a sequence of sight-gags and gore effects, this is actually pretty entertaining.

It's most easily compared to the scores of Troma films that follow about the same formula. While I personally don't mind some of Troma's more self-indulgent melon-crushing escapades, the quality bar's not set very high on a lot of those, and that's about what I was expecting going into Zombie Self-Defense Force. To my surprise, this actually turned out to actually be better than a lot of the Troma stuff.

Here are some of the high points:

Long, weird, but interesting opening propaganda spiel about why the U.S. government and its military actions are bad, but hamburgers and George Romero are good.

A flying zombie fetus that explodes from the womb of a dead, but pregnant, zombie...

... which then immediately lassos the innkeeper with his umbilical cord and goes Blanka on the innkeeper's face.

We eventually meet the aliens that are causing all of these problems... this is what they look like. As it turns out they're not built for dealing with robots + swords.

The final showdown between robot-lady and ghost-man. Same as all the other fights, but with even more sparks and hilariously inappropriate sound-effects than usual to indicate how epic it is.

Nine Dead

People suddenly wake up in a dirty, industrial, mysterious room and find themselves chained to pipes and at the mercy of a mask-wearing, deep voiced killer. It seems like I've heard this before...

Earlier this week I noticed that Chris Shadley's contribution to the ever-growing pool of Saw-clones, "Nine Dead" (also his directorial debut), was available on Netflix Instant Play. I wasn't terribly interested in it, but Instant Play makes me do crazy things sometimes.

Now I've always liked Melissa Joan Hart for some reason, probably just residual Clarissa Explains It All nostalgia-cred... but by about the 20 minute mark, I just had to admit the truth. Watching Melissa Joan Hart trying to act in a serious role is just painful to watch. Very little about Nine Dead isn't bad, but she still manages to be one of the worst things in it.

I won't even bother with a plot synopsis with this film. If you've at least read the back of the Saw DVD, then you know the premise of Nine Dead. There are several important differences though, and those are what I'll focus on. That and why all of them are reasons that Saw was successful and this film is a failure.

The Villain:

Personally, I always found the Jigsaw mask to be not so much frightening, as just plain silly... but it is iconic in a way that a nondescript rubber mask is not. You will forget this character by the time the movie is over.

Effects:

With a movie that has no real substance and only promises that nine people will die, the only way it can deliver is if the deaths are somehow interesting. Here, every 10 minutes the killer enters the room, shoots someone (off camera), and pulls them out of the room. Every death is anticlimactic and boring. In fact, the only interesting thing about it is that every ten minutes we know we have one less annoying character to deal with.

Characters:

In Saw there are only the two victims, the entire movie is character development, you understand the characters, and have come to like the doctor well enough that you can actually care when he breaks down later.

In Nine Dead, you have nine victims, and they're all irritating and whiny. There are some attempts to develop a couple of the characters (all by way of the awkward "tell a story while looking off into the distance, fade to flashback" plot device), but it's just too little too late. We already hate these characters and just want them to hurry and die.

One of these flashbacks shows us that Kelley (Melissa Joan Hart) was at one point captured and tossed into a rapevan. The guy ripped into her clothing while she noticed that the floor was dirty.

When she says he ripped her clothes off, she actually means he made two ridiculous cuts with a pair of scissors... I can only hope that they fired who was in charge of costuming after this scene.

At some point she noticed a bat in the van, so she beat the guy to death with it. This is the goriest scene in the movie and the camera never leaves her face to show what she may be doing. As with every other death, the filmmakers leave us to see her hitting something off camera. I can't imagine why this movie got an R rating, it seems pretty adamant about not leaving PG-13 territory.

Oh, and about that flashback... It's completely irrelevant to the rest of the movie.

Ending:

With Saw, there is a well done twist that actually does something aside from just pissing you off. The tension builds to a climax and then leaves you with a finale everyone talks about afterward.

In Nine Dead, there's a sort of twist... the killer gives up, frees everyone, and then Kelley shoots him and the two other survivors to keep a secret from her past from being revealed (the secret's not anything interesting). This was obviously the direction things were going, and unless you've been dozing off throughout the movie it comes as no surprise when it happens.

At the killer's last moment though, he alludes to the fact that everything that's been happening has been recorded/broadcast and the police now know everything that's happened. So Kelley runs out of the room to try to escape capture while a S.W.A.T. team makes their way up. Just when you think that the movie might redeem itself with Melissa Joan Hart dying in a hail of bullets, she goes around the corner in the hallway (with the S.W.A.T. team just behind her) and the movie fades to black and rolls the credits. If anyone's left talking about that ending afterward it will just be about how it badly it pissed them off.


Considering that the Saw formula isn't exactly complicated, and Nine Dead had three times the budget of Saw, what we're left with is just an inexcusable trainwreck of a film. Avoid it at all costs.

Bad Biology

From time to time, I like to consider horror movies that just need to be made... a decent zombie western for example (We already have a lot of indians dying out upon the sudden introduction of strange new disease; you couldn't ask for a better zombie setup!).

I know that at some point I considered some sort of "zombie genitals" idea (I think this one of the possible ways I thought Flesh Eating Mothers might have been saved), but couldn't really see how it could work all that well. Luckily for all of us, Frank Henenlotter is a lot more creative with this sort of premise than I am.

Actually, "zombie genitals" is a little oversimplified for what's going on here. It's got a sort of Jekyll and Hyde feel to it too. Both main characters lead somewhat normal public lives, but with mutant self-aware genitals that happen to take over their hosts from time to time when they're feeling a little bloodlust (literally).


I'm always impressed with Henenlotter's characters. It seems like they're written to fail horribly, but somehow they just seem to work. Like Brian in Brain Damage, Duane in Basket Case, and Jeffrey Franken in Frankenhooker, the leads here communicate almost the entire plot through monologue.

It's hard to imagine a case where that sort of thing would actually work , yet Henenlotter seems to always give his characters some sort of barely masked mental instability that allows them to awkwardly mumble strings of soliloquy without seeming unnatural. On top of that feat, the monologue lines are great! Almost everyone of his films is hilariously quotable, and the great lines all come from these ridiculous monologues.

Of course, the monologue is only half of his winning formula here. Henenlotter always impresses me with his ability to find unknown actors that can actually pull off these odd characters so well.

Charlee Danielson does a great job as Jennifer ("Garden of Eden, Sodom and Gomorrah, Armageddon and all the disciples in my pussy at once!"), I can't wait to see her in more.

Anthony Sneed does just fine as Batz ("I got a drug-addicted dick with a mind of its own!"), owner of the raging rapenis. Bad Biology is his only credited movie role showing on IMDB, and if that's really the case, I'm even more impressed. I don't know where Henenlotter finds these people for his low-budget masterpieces, but I hope other low-budget filmmakers start looking there too.


One last thing that's significant here is that Henenlotter actually does use a little CG in this film. He doesn't stray from his favored stop-motion monster effects totally however, and usually just uses a little CG to patch a few things in the physical effects. Still, on one or two occasions we are treated to some purely CG effects like this.


Overall, I've got to say that I loved Bad Biology. It's great to see that after the 16 years that have passed since the last Basket Case movie, Frank Henenlotter is able to pick up right where he left off.

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra

If you long for the days when filmmakers could take a camera and a couple of bucks out to the middle of nowhere and return with their beautifully weird sci-fi masterpieces, then you're in luck, as Larry Blamire seems to believe that those days aren't over.

The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra starts by introducing us to Dr. Paul Armstrong (Larry Blamire) and his wife Betty (Fay Masterson), as they are going away to spend a few days in a little cottage in the woods where the scientist can of course, do science.



At the same time, a couple of Marvians from planet Marva, Kro-Bar and Lattis, crash land their ship in the same woods. After the crash, the Marvians find that that what they need to repair their ship happens to be the same material that Dr. Armstrong is studying. To top it all off, their pet mutant seems to have escaped during the crash.


As if that wasn't enough, Dr. Roger Fleming (Brian Howe), a sort of mad scientist, happens to be interested in the very same area, only he's there to try to find a haunted cave and awaken the titular Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (a biology class model bought on ebay) and use his power for himself. Although he clearly wasn't quite counting on finding such a sassy and unaccommodating skeleton.


What ensues as they all bumble through the forest running into one another is 90 minutes of memorable, quotable hilarity in a near perfect comedic tribute to 50's sci-fi.

I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up Animala (Jennifer Blaire). She completely steals the show, while being almost completely mute aside from her single repeated word of dialogue. In her black tights and short hair, she's an apparent throwback to another bit of 50's sci-fi, Cat-Women of the Moon.


The only real problem here is knowing the whole time that there's a completed sequel that's been lying around for a long while awaiting distribution, and that won't be available until mid-2010.

Mark your calendars.

Rodentz

With a name like Rodentz, and a tagline of "Hide the cheese!," my my hopes were about as high as possible when I popped this one in. That all quickly fizzled away unfortunately, as this is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

One constant problem is that they insist on using CG rats all the time. Only it seems like they only got about 10 seconds of CG rat footage to work with, so you just see the same CG rats running by over and over. Keep in mind, these are not dragons or giant fighting robots... they're rats, and real rats can be had for cheap. I just don't get it. The only real reason I could come up with for them to even bother was that in the few scenes they do use real rats for close-ups, and need them to look menacing, they can only seem to pull off looking cute and curious.

As bad as that CG rats clip is, it begins to become apparent that that took up the whole effects budget, as elsewhere we see characters seemingly attacked by brown fuzzy slippers and the like.

Not to mention the guy in a brown barney suit, which is nearly falling to pieces, who's supposed to be a giant rat.


In most cases, I'd probably find a lot of these little flaws endearing to a film if it was still somewhat enjoyable, but this wasn't even close. The story moves glacially, the characters are not interesting at all, you spend the movie hoping that they'll all just die as soon as possible. One of the best characters is the drunken janitor, who we are introduced to right as he passes through on his way to the basement to be killed by the rats.

The "hot-girl" character is annoying, but is a little more of a caricature than the other generic horror movie characters, and as such lends a slightly amusing meta-quality to the film. She spends the movie in a pair of very tight jeans which, as the movie progresses, sink lower and lower down her hips, while at the same time her thong straps creep higher and higher up her torso. This is actually sort of funny, and the sort of thing that could have made the movie more interesting if it had explored a little more, but in the end, everything else about her and all the other characters is just painful to witness.

One more thing, the DVD case states on the front, "Formatted from the original aspect ratio to fit your television screen," and then puts a picture below that showing exactly what the ratio changes would be to accomodate a regular television's ratio, and a widescreen television's ratio... But then below all that it says "Presented in the original 1.33:1 aspect ratio."
What?

Machine Girl

Machine Girl is a Japanese action/horror film about a highschool girl, Ami, who's life gets flipped, turned upside down when her family is attacked by another family of ninjas/Yakuza. She loses an arm in the process. Soon after she decides to go for her revenge, so she gets a bit of Evil-Dead-style arm enhancement gadgetry and goes to work.

These sorts of things aren't for everyone, but seeing the cover is probably enough to decide one way or the other. Either you're on board for machine gun arms, drill bras, and enjoy a good 20 foot arterial spray... or not.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I'd assume Robert Rodriguez must've liked the idea too since he made his own and called it Planet Terror.

Available on Amazon: The Machine Girl

Aliens Gone Wild

When I came across this in a North Carolina thrift store and saw the name "Aliens Gone Wild," I bought it without even glancing at the back. I believe I paid $4 for it, any more and I might have gotten disappointed. This is not the "Aliens Gone Wild" movie I was imagining.

A couple of minutes in, I found out that this was actually meant to be a highlight reel from some of Full Moon's alien-based movies in the past. Except at 3 hours long... it's a lot more than just the highlights. You actually almost see enough to follow some of the stories for the films, but because they basically just jump around to the action scenes, you miss all the rest and just get exceptionally unsatisfying versions of a bunch of different alien movies.

It's kind of like watching one of those movie trailers that gives away every plot twist and scare shot in the movie... only there are about a dozen of them back to back, and they're all about 15 minutes long.

The only redeeming qualities are the few extras and the fact that Full Moon has such a large catalog represented here, it's bound to lead you to a movie that you'd actually like to see. That's not quite enough for me to suggest this to anyone else though.