House

House is a film that seems to set out to defy all attempts at categorization or even comprehension.

If you were to imagine a version of Evil Dead directed by Luis Buñuel using overly-colorized sets from H. R. Pufnstuf... from the point of view of a half-dozen Japanese schoolgirls that are simultaneously having the same nightmare about it... that is House.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. This movie has a lot of interesting history so I'll need to back up a bit.

In the mid-70's, after emerging from an art group that included the likes of Yoko Ono, a lifelong film-experimenter by the name of Nobuhiko Obayashi was working as a director of strangely avant-garde television commercials. After a few of these...

One of his most famous series of commercials starred Charles Bronson for Mandom cologne.

...he managed to catch the eye of Nagaharu Yodogawa, a journalist, who wrote "If Obayashi can make such TV commercials, he should be able to make Japanese films more exciting." Only a year later, Obayashi was approached by Toho Studios about trying to make a film "as exciting as Jaws," and he was finally given a chance to make his first commercial feature.

After his initial meeting however, Obayashi found that he didn't really want to go in the direction the studio was hoping for at all. He just couldn't find any artistic appeal in trying to make some sort of man-eating animal Jaws clone like they were suggesting. When he got home afterward he found his 13 year-old daughter Chigumi brushing her hair in front of a mirror, so he asked her what she thought about his predicament. Her reply was, "If my reflection in the mirror could jump out and eat me, that'd be scary." Obayashi knew she was onto something altogether different than Jaws, so he immediately followed that by asking what else she thought might be scary. Her reply? "I love playing theme tunes on the piano after watching the films, but I can't play as well as you dad... and it feels as if the keys are biting my fingers."

Pictured: Not Jaws. I think we're onto something...

Later, while visiting relatives in the country, Nobuhiko and Chigumi retrieved a watermelon from a well, split it open with a cleaver and ate it. Afterwards Chigumi remarked, "As the watermelon came out of the well, it looked like it was a smiling head and it was scary."

Pictured: Also not Jaws

The story's generation proceeded along those lines until what emerged was a strange fantasy about a group of girls who go to stay for a while in a house belonging to one girl's widowed aunt... who's a cannibal... and can possess the house itself to make it do her bidding.

Also, this cat's involved.

Now just in case those glowing eyes were a little too subtle for the viewer to pick up on, the film goes out of its way to rationally explain why this is a paranormal cat...

Anyway, the aunt/house proceeds to try "eating" the girls and has some degree of success. The pretty girl's face shatters and falls off, men are reduced to skeletons and/or piles of bananas (in a scene I couldn't even begin to describe), and eventually we find ourselves at a climax that must include every crazy camera effect Obayashi had available to him. That clip is long enough to shows how the movie resolves the little haunted-house problem: at the last minute disembodied legs kick a painting of the cat, which kills the cat, which kills the aunt... Now at this point I'm sure the more logically minded readers are thinking, "Wait, wouldn't that cause the room to fill with cat's blood?"

Well yes... yes it would.

As strange as all of this might have been, as it turned out this was the first time in Japanese history that a film studio had been willing to risk getting behind a filmmaker that wasn't one of their contracted employee-directors, so, whatever Obayashi produced, it was very important that it be well-received. Luckily for Obayashi and the rest of Japan's stranger filmmakers, it was a huge success... The industry was changed and actual film-making was now a realistic ambition for Japanese artists with crazy movie ideas everywhere.

Visually, House is an hour and a half of interesting-looking and historically significant art. As strange as the images we see are, it's obvious that every single thing in the film was specifically intended to look exactly as it does.

I think the trailer said it right by introducing this film as: A FEAR TOO BEAUTIFUL TO RESIST! If you're as interested in not resisting as I am, tour dates for screenings are posted on the Janus Janus site. DVD and Blu-Ray are available on Amazon.


Note: As for the title, House seems to usually be referred to as the Japanese word, "Hausu." The English word "House" is used as the actual title on even the original Japanese promo artwork... so I'll be sticking with that.

Trailer:

All About Evil

Last weekend I managed to catch Peaches Christ's directorial debut, All About Evil, as it stopped off at the Midtown Art Cinema in Atlanta, Georgia.

The event, (described by Peaches as a "spooktacular"), includes a pre-screening live show that features a couple of song and dance numbers perfomed by Peaches Christ and an assortment of local drag-monsters. The film is touring through 20 or so stops across the country, featuring one or more cast members at each stop. In my case, I got veteran John Waters actress, Mink Stole...

and I can't say that I would've had it any other way.

For any not familiar with Peaches Christ, she is the stage persona of Joshua Grannell and regular host of "Midnight Mass" shows. In appearance, she's a sort of glittery drag-Elvira with just a dash of Divine.

Probably not a coincidence.

After the song and dance bits, "Gore Gore Girl" and "Female Trouble" (that was still stuck in my head when I woke up this morning), and a brief clip-show introduction piece revisiting famous Mink Stole scenes, the lights went down and the real fun began.

All About Evil is the story of a mousy assistant-librarian named Deborah (Natasha Lyonne) who has inherited her recently-deceased father's beloved old movie house, the Victoria Theatre. When we meet her she's grieving over her father, but is particularly upset that her father has died without getting to see her succeed at "the business of show," as she's never had any luck getting work as an actress.

When her cold-hearted mother (Julie Caitlin Brown) comes in to try threatening Deborah into selling the theater, she snaps, killing her with a stab to the neck... and then giving her a few more for good measure.



What she doesn't realize until later is that the murder has been captured by surveillance cameras and, as luck would have it, almost immediately gets accidentally played back to the entire theater.

The attending cult-horror fans mistake the CCTV snuff film for a well-acted homemade cult film and embrace it wholeheartedly. When Deborah realizes what's happened, she seizes the opportunity to rejuvenate the independent theater and, most of all, to finally get her moment in the spotlight.

Short after grisly short is filmed and screened like this, seemingly daily in a very quick sort of macabre Be Kind Rewind fashion and the theater's popularity swells nearly as quickly as Deborah's growing ego.


The diva-directress (now pronouncing her name De Bor'a) finds she can't do all this on her own however, so she and the projectionist (Jack Donner) round up the twisted twins, Vera and Veva (Jade and Nikita Ramsey)...


...and a murderous young drifter (played by Noah Seegan, who you've probably last seen in Dead Girl)...


...to round up these victims a bit more efficiently. The shorts this little team produce really are brilliant, and with names like Gore and Peace, A Tale of Two Titties and The Diary of Ann Frankenstein I'm sure that will come as no surprise.

Seriously.

Their first team production takes them to the library Deborah had worked at earlier, to have a go at the librarian, Evelyn (Mink Stole), to create a very persuasive video about keeping quiet during movies. I'm not going to give away what exactly they do to her, but Mink Stole's version of the All About Evil poster gives a little bit of a hint...


Things eventually hit a snag for Deborah when her biggest fan, Steven (Thomas Dekker, from the Terminator TV series and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake), starts noticing that all the young folks appearing in her films happen to overlap with the growing number of students going missing from school. Steven doesn't have an easy time looking into this though, as he's constantly interrupted at school by the faculty who are convinced that his horror-interests mean that he's going to "Columbine" the place at any second... And things don't go too much smoother at home where he's got his concerned mother (Cassandra Peterson) to deal with.

Freud would have a field-day with this kid.
This is what's on his wall just to the right of the frame there.

The murder-movies get bigger and better until they culminate in the biggest show at the theater, which pretty much involves the whole town. I won't spoil any details regarding the climactic ending, but it manages to be even more over-the-top than the rest of the movie thus far.

Since the Victoria is in San Francisco, "the whole town" includes Peaches Christ herself in one of her several cameos.

Low-budget, independent horror movies are often either so horribly acted as to become unwatchable, or so financially restricted that their silly effects prevent the movie from being taken seriously... but All About Evil suffers from none of that. The production values really shine throughout, and with such a surprisingly strong cast, there's never any bad line-reads that take you out of the scene or anything of that sort.

Long-time Elvira fans may find themselves pleasantly surprised and impressed by Cassandra's Peterson's ability to change tones and actually play a "straight" character role for a change, but she makes the transition look easy. Vera and Veva, the evil twins, were even more surprising. They're genuinely creepy throughout, in a sort of slasher-Wednesday Addams way, but all their other work seems to be stuff like this:

Those "Brit twins" were not exactly an obvious choice for this sort of role by any means, but the result speaks for itself.

Ultimately, what I think I was most impressed with was the tasteful handling of wink/nod distribution concerning all the little genre references sprinkled throughout.

The logo's font is a derivative of the Evil Dead font for example...


While not everything is quite as subtle as all that, you get the idea. Considering that such subtlety usually seems out of reach to horror-comedies (and, come to think of it, drag queens too for that matter...) this reserved sort of homage-handling was one of the most surprising and appreciated aspects for me.

As I recall, there was only one small technical detail that bothered me with this movie. There were a couple of times (one of which I remember was in the very beginning when Deborah's mother comes by) when the hand-held camera shot was uncomfortably wobbly to me. That only happens about two or three times as I recall, but it just always bothers me when tiny things like that pull my attention away from a story that I'm really enjoying otherwise.

I don't think enough good things can be said about Joshua Grannell's first attempt at direction here. I left this thinking that it's pretty much exactly the sort of thing that any genre-respecting filmmaker trying for a horror-comedy should aim for, and that's certainly not a bad standard to set with your first try at making a film.

I can't wait to hear more about Grannell's possible upcoming new project that may be in the works. In the meantime, if the All About Evil spooktacular extravaganza comes through your area, be sure not to miss out. Tour information can be found at the film's website, AllAboutEvilTheMovie.com.

Sleepaway Camp

From the first scenes of Sleepaway Camp it's pretty apparent that we're setting off down the heavily-trodden path to the Friday the 13th cloning summer camp. Pretty soon though, we start to get hints that things are going to be a little different with this one.

First of all there's eerie Aunt Martha (Ricky's mother) who Angela lives with after her father dies. Her character seems to fall somewhere between "Generic high school acting teacher" and "creepiest thing you've ever seen."

Full scene

Soon enough we leave Aunt Martha's house and follow Angela and Ricky to camp. As soon as they arrive, we start to realize that shy Angela, who's been very quiet thus far, is a little odder than your average socially awkward teenager and doesn't talk to anyone... ever.


These are the sorts of things that work pretty effectively to lend us a sense of uneasiness that I wasn't really expecting out of what I'd anticipated to be such a formulaic summer camp setup. The movie progresses along like this, introducing us to the other campers and counselors, and gradually starting to work in a few pretty creative slasher kills.

Notice that the guy who looks like a cross between Lloyd Kaufman and Mel Brooks
gets an appropriately ridiculous death scene.

They're all shot from the killer's point of view so that you can't see who it is and we're obviously being set up for the usual Scooby-Doo reveal ending. Before we get there though, we need to take a detour into the strange sexual aspect of Sleepaway Camp.

Whereas you'd ordinarily just pepper your slasher with a few breasts and call it a day, Hiltzik did things a little differently and cranked the homoeroticism all the way up. First of all there's Aunt Martha. By the end of the film I still hadn't figured out the gender there. Then we have all the male counselors and older campers not bothering with the camp uniform everyone else wears, in favor of these sorts of skimpy outfits.

I'd be willing to doubt the intention of that and just write it off as an 80's dress-anomaly, except the female counselors and all the young campers pretty much just stick to their regular Camp Arawak uniforms. After a while with that, the focus shifts away from the men's bodies and turns back toward the murders... which give Angela flashbacks of seeing her father with his boyfriend.


If these things were all part of some sort of weird, homophobic, "gay people cause murder" message, it would at least make more sense. As it stands, they just serve as more of the strange story anomalies that constantly pop up to defy the otherwise standard summer-camp slasher formula we're working with.

If you've heard vague descriptions of the movie from anyone, they'll probably just be about how shocking it is or how the climax is something that you will never forget... something along those lines. At least, those are the sorts of things I'd heard. But up to this point, aside from the entertaining little abnormalities I've been mentioning, there really hasn't been anything too mind-blowing to speak of and I didn't really see how things were going to suddenly turn around and suddenly fulfill all that had been promised. Soon enough though, the big reveal comes and whether you've figured out who it is or not (you probably have) is completely irrelevant. The execution of the final scene is something that was engineered to be burned into the brain forever, while just incidentally communicating the plot resolution on the side.

The characters catch the killer, the killer turns to face them, and then the characters all just stop what they're doing and freeze in place so as to not distract you from the scene's hypnotic effects until the movie's finished having its way with your eyeballs... not to mention that terrible noise...

The first time I saw it, I was still making that face halfway through the credits.

I'm not willing to give away any more details about the ending here, but this movie is definitely shocking and does turn out to have a conclusion that you'll never ever forget.

If you've not seen it yet, what the hell are you waiting for? Go ahead and give yourself a new favorite slasher.

Available on Amazon: Sleepaway Camp

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.

Terror at the Red Wolf Inn

We start off by watching Regina bicycle around town for a while. Usually these drawn-out extended opening scenes are pretty boring, but she seems so klutzy that I was watching just because I expected her to fall over at any moment... especially since we see that she can hardly ride on flat ground without running into people, just before she turns and rides down sets of stairs.

As soon as she arrives at home, she gets a phone call letting her know that she's won a vacation. She mentions that she didn't enter any contest, and they don't tell her where she's going... but none of this really seems to bother her. She's just excited about winning something.


She soon gets on a charter jet and flies out to wherever they take her. Upon landing she's picked up by Baby John. One car chase later, they arrive at the Red Wolf Inn. They're greeted by Evelyn (Mary Jackson) and a few other girls who all seem to have won the same sort of free stay at the inn. The girls talk a bit, and Evelyn goes off to prepare what she promises will be a marvelous dinner.

Regina is still a little curious, and goes into the kitchen to offer her help. Evelyn declines, but quickly gives her a task to do when she shows interest in exploring the walk-in freezer.

What follows is about 10 minutes of all the girls and the family gorging themselves on the Evelyn's food. Everyone loves it and eats as much as they can handle.

A little more than they can handle actually.

The girls all head to bed, and the next morning, one of them is gone. Evelyn says she left early in the morning and no one presses the issue any further.

Regina explores a bit outside, and we're introduced to one of the first instances of the truly awful soundtrack of this movie. There's a couple of minutes of what's supposed to be tension-building violin screeches, but it just sounds there's a fly buzzing by every few seconds.

Regina soon ends up going to the beach with Baby John for some sandwiches and romance. Baby John kisses Regina a little awkwardly for a while, until they notice that he's got a bite on his fishing line. When he looks over to it, we see that apparently the fish reeled itself in, because there's a small shark on the beach. Baby John runs over to it, picks it up by the tail and swings it against a log until it's head is falling apart, then he drops it and punches it a few times because... why not. This awkward situation transforms into something wonderfully ridiculous when Baby John suddenly looks up and says, "I think I love you," making it one of the best scenes of the film.

Shark destruction starts at about 4:20

No animals were harmed during the making of... Oh, nevermind...

That night, we see Baby John and his grandfather (Arthur Space) kill Edwina in her sleep with some sort of poison and carry her downstairs to the big kitchen to butcher. The next day, Regina finds out that Edwina is missing and knows something strange is happening. She tries to get Baby John to run away with her, but he's not sure he can leave his grandmother. Eventually Regina gets a chance to have a look at that walk-in freezer, so she does, and finds portions of her friends there. She screams and the horrible sound effects provide us with about a minute of car horns for no good reason.


She tries to run away, but they're in the middle of nowhere and she just gets picked up by Evelyn and Henry again.

Baby John convinces Regina to come down for dinner, and she does, but gets sick when she's served some Edwina rump roast. Henry and Evelyn tell Baby John that they'll have to take care of Regina that night, but Baby John isn't too happy about that so he rushes to tell Regina that he'll run away with her.

They make an attempt but get caught by Evelyn and Henry. Henry comes at Regina with a cleaver, we get a close up of Henry and Evelyn's excited faces (complete with train sound effects), and then we see Regina scream and blood splatter across the ground.

But as it turns out, Baby John jumped up and saved her at the last moment. And now that they've got the house to themselves, Regina's actually not in such a hurry to leave... and since she's been eating people for the last few days anyway, it seems a shame to let the two grandparents go to waste. So Regina takes over as the cook the Red Wolf Inn.


Terror at Red Wolf Inn really took me by surprise. While it's not a great film, it's pretty fun and has a lot of character. It's sort of odd in that it's a movie about murder and cannibalism shown by way of a PG rated film, but here the fact that we never actually see the older couple murdering and butchering people means that we only ever see them being really nice to the girls. And frankly that just makes the whole thing creepier.

This movie doesn't have scare shots or gore, and hardly any violence at all, but it does actually succeed at keeping you feeling uneasy the whole time because everything is just so damn weird. Once the killings start, the film starts working in some subtly humorous things, but it's never overt enough that you're taken out of the story, so the extra weirdness just adds more strange creepiness to the situations.

The front of my VHS copy declares "In the tradition of The Addams Family and Beetlejuice," and while I can see how you could say that they were all comedic with a creepy flair, Terror at the Red Roof Inn isn't really that similar to those other two at all. The film does try to at least end on a fun note with Regina and Baby John taking Henry and Evelyn's place, and while that absurd twist does seem like it should be humorous, they're still just a couple of people driven insane, eating human flesh, while their victims' heads sit off to the side.


Even if no one else notices that this scene might not be the fun romp it's trying to be, Henry does. So after the credits finish his head turns and winks at the camera in one last attempt to defuse the creepiness.

lol jk guyz

Available on Amazon:
Double Feature: House of the Living Dead/Terror at the Red Wolf Inn

Slime City

This turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I picked up this DVD because it was cheap and had an amusing case. I was also intrigued that this was an 80's creature/slasher film that I'd somehow never even heard of. Now that I've seen it, I'm not sure why there's not a bigger following for it.

The story is oddly captivating, and once things really get going, we eventually reach a great final climax. The last 10 minutes or so are just wonderful, with the main character turning into a monstrous zombie, attacking his girlfriend, being decapitated, and then attacking again sans-head, with the severed head attacking on its own.

The movie makes constant attempts at gore, but doesn't really arrive there in the usual way. It certainly has a distinctive repulsion-free style of body mutilation, and often ends up looking more like the effects department from 90's era Nickelodeon studios provided the trademark slime... but all of this somehow works.

If you'd like to pick up a copy of the DVD, the director sells them himself. They're $10, including s&h, and come signed.
SlimeGuy.com