Xue Call ji (1988)

... aka: 血CALL機

... aka: 賭命23

... aka: Bloodbath 23

... aka: Blood Call

... aka: Life Gamble 23

Directed by:

Oli Nicole (probable alias)

Lu Tung (uncredited)

Figured I'd give this long-forgotten Hong Kong film a go since various websites can't even determine what genre it is (I've seen it listed as crime, horror, thriller, comedy, drama AND action) and there's been very little discussion about it anywhere online. I regretted that decision almost immediately. The opening twenty minutes were so sloppy, disjointed, confusing and incoherent I just wanted to hit stop right then and there. Yet I stuck this one out and was rewarded with... Well, not much actually. It just seemed to get worse the longer it went on! The mixed genre classification is now understandable since this doesn't really fit into just one or two molds, much to this particular film's detriment.

An opening title card informs us that there's a dangerous escaped convict on the loose, which is followed by a radio news broadcast relaying the same exact information the title card just showed us seconds earlier, only really adding that the psycho was last seen wearing a "khaki safari suit" (!?) Next up are scenes from an aerobics class (well, OK, it's not ALL bad), featuring a really bad pop song complete with annoying "slick" music video-style edits. One of the aerobics ladies, Anna Mok (Anna Kamiyama), is disrupted mid-routine when a threatening telephone call from a man who's recently been stalking her miraculously broadcasts over a speaker to the entire class. Anna attempts to call the police multiple times but they completely ignore her as she whines for help ("He already called 13 times!"). That's followed by a botched nightmare sequence where she hops in the shower and some man opens the door and she screams. Poor Anna can't even get any sleep as the nut job calls her incessantly at home even in the middle of the night. Because of all this, Anna has a phobia of pagers (?!)

We next meet a couple of Anna's friends, Maria (Maria "Christina" / Tung Ling) and Cindy (Woon-Jing Shin). Cindy is the studious one who's just returned back to Hong Kong from studying in the U. S. and Maria is the immature and irresponsible one who smokes pot. The subtitles are so bad it was difficult to gauge the relationships of these women but I believe Maria and Cindy are supposed to be sisters, or all three ladies are sisters.

Things are somehow even more confusing when it comes to the male characters. There's Hsiung (Siu Chung Mok), who is either an amateur detective or an ex-con who specializes in converting plastic toy guns into lethal firearms (?) Michael (Michael Chow) is Anna's former lover who now can't take no for an answer, is stalking her and (I think) plotting to kill her. There's Chung (Eddy Ko), the escaped convict from the news broadcasts, who's also a sex pervert, stalker (he appears to be after a valuable gun that Hsiung possesses), rapist and serial killer. And then there's Hsiung's brother Charlie (played by Charlie Cho in his usual "comic" role); a Royal H.K. police inspector and yet another pervert who attempts to use his position to persuade Chung's sister (Kwai-Chi Tan) to sleep with him.

It's a frustrating, headache-inducing mess trying to keep tabs on all these people, who they are and how they are all connected, especially since the film does an incredibly poor job setting these characters up in the first place. I'm not even sure * I * got it right despite taking notes the whole time and couldn't even tell if this was mostly the fault of the subtitles or mostly the fault of the filmmakers, though I suspect both can be blamed.

Desperate to get away from the city and hide out (something even her stalker ex-boyfriend recommends she do!), Anna goes to an employment agency and has them set her up on a nanny assignment. She's sent to the countryside to watch over a lonely, motherless, neglected little boy named Hsiao Chieh, who lives with his father in a large home near the beach. The father, a recently-out-of-the-closet gay man complete with stereotypical limp wrists, is planning on leaving the country "for one day" to stay with his Filipino boyfriend and instructs Anna to make sure his son goes to school and leaves it at that. Otherwise she has free reign over use of the home, car and everything else. Seeing how the father simply never returns, we can assume this was all a set-up to enable him to just abandon his child.

Both Hsiung and Chung travel to same small town and start terrorizing Anna. Hsiung befriends Hsiao Chieh, takes him to an arcade, starts claiming to be a relative of the family and moves into the home, where he annoys the hell out of Anna by spraying her with a fire extinguisher, playing cruel pranks on her, saying cruel things to her, eating all of her food, playing his music loud and inviting the annoying Charlie over to visit. Charlie in turn brings Chung's sister there and she wastes no time calling up Chung and giving him the address. Lots of weird, nonsensical stuff happens (the incoherence is only exacerbated since much of it takes place in the pitch dark) and eventually a love-hate relationship forms between Anna and Hsiung.

A man is suffocated with a plastic bag in front of his four-year-old son, a corpse the little boy sees floating in the ocean disappears without a trace, photos of victims are left at the home, women are stripped naked, raped and / or killed, there are repeat shots of clothes being thrown on the floor and lots of oversized 80s hoop earrings. During one (admittedly clever) nightmare sequence, our heroine has scenes from her former failed relationship projected on a movie theater screen. The finale is a nighttime home invasion with noir lighting attempts, with Bolo Yeung making a brief appearance as a thug who tries to light up Anna's crotch with a welding torch (!) and is eventually electrocuted by a booby trapped toilet (?) A "message" behind the nonsense we've just suffered through is shoehorned in at the very end followed by repeat clips of footage we've already watched.

Most interestingly, this film has an obsession with pagers, which includes using them to kill / electrocute people on multiple occasions. I don't know if it was a then-new technology they were hoping to exploit or if the filmmakers were wanting to highlight the pitfalls of one being accessible at all hours of the day and night by others; a problem that has only increased tenfold since the internet and cell phones took over all of our lives. It's difficult to tell just what's going on here or what the film's intentions are.

The choppy editing is terrible and this features a few other hallmarks of a troubled production that had to be stitched together from fragments of the original shoot, including inept use of slow motion, freeze frames and multi-character voice-overs trying to explain what's going on yet only making things even more confusing. Even though this was a chore for this particular viewer to get through, I suppose it may appeal to those who like pseudo-surreal, nonsensical rubbish they can pick their brains trying to assign some kind of meaning to.

I'm also not entirely sure just who directed this film. The opening credits list one "Oli Nicole," whose name can also be found multiple times in the end credits for providing oil paintings and writing lyrics to some of the songs. However, both the HK Movie Database and HK Cinemagic list the director / writer / producer as Lu Tung (who otherwise worked mostly as a writer), so there's the definite possibility that "Oli Nicole" is just a pseudonym he's using. I'm not aware of any restored versions of this film being available and it was last released here in the U.S. on VHS by both Tai Seng and Rainbow Audio & Video. There was also a laserdisc release.

★1/2

Escalofrío (1978)

... aka: Chills

... aka: Don't Panic

... aka: Nuit Infernale (Hellish Night)

... aka: Satan's Blood

... aka: Schock

Directed by:

Carlos Puerto

Juan Piquer Simón (prologue)

Have you ever bumped into someone you didn't know who knew you? They may come up to you and say, "Hey Bob!" and you're like "Hey, uh, um..." trying to put a name to the face and conceal your confused, askance facial expression. That actually happened to me several years ago at a gas station when I back in my home town visiting my parents. A guy walked up to me when I was in line and was like "Justin?" and I was like "Yeah" and then he shook my hand. Forcing a smile, I was like "Hey, what's up?" which led to several minutes of me fielding all kinds of questions about what I was doing, where I was living, etc. The best I could do was try to hide the fact I didn't remember this guy and dance around his questions like I was at some job interview. But the thing is, I never let this guy on to the fact I didn't know who he was. I STILL don't know who this guy was. I even ended the conversation never learning his name or where he knew me from. I probably was thinking the man would feel either dejected or insulted if I said "Who are you again?"

That's basically how memories work. You may have made a bigger imprint on someone else's than vice versa due to any number of circumstances, plus some people just have better memories than others. Maybe mine sucks and is just limited to humiliating moments that happened 15 years ago that randomly pop in my head right when I'm trying to go to sleep at night. Like when I was in high school and my English teacher misplaced my paper yet still forced me to get up in front of the class with some notes and "do your best." I then proceeded to give a completely jumbled and incomprehensible red-faced speech as my peers looked on at me like I was insane. And then there was a moment in college when I arrived to class a few minutes late, tripped and fell in front of around 200 people in an otherwise completely silent auditorium. See, while I very vividly remember these things, chances are no one who witnessed them do. At least that's what I like to tell myself.

The opening scenes of this one cleverly play upon all of that. Would you flat out tell someone who claims to know you, and even provides evidence that he does, that you don't recall them, or would you just kind of go along with the story the other person is selling? That's the situation José María Guillén's character Andy finds himself in when he's out on a leisurely weekend drive with his four-months-pregnant wife, Annie (played by Mariana Karr), and their German Shepherd, Blaky. While stopped at a traffic light, a car pulls up next to them and the occupants keep staring. At the next light, the same car pulls up and the same couple stare at them until the guy finally says, "Andy?" They then motion for them to pull over so they can talk.

The mystery man - Bruno (Ángel Aranda) - claims to be a former college classmate. Andy is skeptical, especially when the story the man gives has a few holes in it. For starters, he looks much older. Second, though he knows what college Andy attended and some of the teachers, he claims the school dean was actually their professor. Still, Bruno knows enough about Andy that he's able to persuade him to accompany him and his wife, Mary (Sandra Alberti), back to their home so he can prove he is who he claims to be. Andy reluctantly agrees, something he quickly starts to regret whenever Bruno pulls off the main road and continues to drive through the country for an entire hour! While Andy did have the balls to question Bruno right away (unlike what I did in my situation), I sure as hell wouldn't have followed the guy an hour away to play catch up! The only one who's as apprehensive as they should be about the situation is the dog, who senses the couple is evil and won't stop barking.

Bruno and Mary take them to a gated old mansion that they claim they only use on weekends. There's also a nameless, mute groundskeeper / guard (Luis Barboo) living there who's just as sinister as the couple. The home is filled with ornate antique furniture and other peculiarities, like a skull, books on the occult and Satanism and an old creepy doll. Andy and Annie are given a "special vintage" of wine to drink and Bruno finally produces that school photograph of he and Andy together, but Andy finds that their names and home address are written on the back of it.

Things don't get any less strange from there as Mary coerces the guests ("Do you believe in the existence of situations that can take us beyond our reality?") into a OUIJA session using a glass goblet. The spirit they call forth then proceeds to pick at one of Andy and Annie's relationship scabs: She once had an affair with his brother. It then claims that Annie is still in love with him; something she denies. Though more than ready to leave at this point, a frazzled and intoxicated Annie passes out. That, combined with a thunderstorm and it already being late, means they'll be spending the night.

Before the night is over, their dog is killed, Annie almost gets raped in the kitchen by a vagrant (who is stabbed to death and dismembered soon after) and the young couple are mesmerized and take part in a Satanic orgy complete with fire, smoke, oil rubdowns and sex in different combinations on the floor on top of a black pentagram. (It's very well photographed and lit and quite an erotic scene actually). The following day, things don't improve as the evil couple do everything in their power to prevent Andy and Annie from leaving the home. Just what do they want exactly?

So, you want to know how Spanish filmmakers celebrated their newfound, post-Franco cinematic freedom? Look no further! This one (given the Spanish 'S' for sex rating upon release) has loads of full frontal male and female nudity, sex, group sex, rape, lesbianism, lesbian rape nightmares, implied homosexuality, cannibalism, dog eating, suicide, blood, gore, a couple of zombies, loads of Satanic iconography, a painting of Jesus going up in flames and more. And it's all good, unclean fun most of the time. Not that this is perfect. After setting up a decent premise and maintaining our intrigue for a good hour plus, the director ends with a hectic barrage of various nonsense that reveals some vague conspiracy then circles us back to the beginning. It will probably leave you scratching your head. Still, this is entertaining, well-made and more skillfully shot, scored and directed than the vast majority of other Satanic sex films from this time.

Puerto only directed one other genre film: the extremely difficult to find La capilla ardiente (1981, "The Burning Chapel"), which was never released in America. The big name attached to this one is Juan Piquer Simón (of POD PEOPLE, Pieces and SLUGS infamy), who was the executive producer, art director and later added two new prologues to the film, including an intro by "Professor Vasallo" (played by Fernando Jiménez del Oso, a real-life parapsychologist, TV host and author) informing us that Satanism is very much real and vouching for the authenticity of the film we're about to watch, and a brief scene where a young woman is placed on a sacrificial altar and is stripped naked, fondled and then stabbed by an old priest (Manuel Pereiro).

Though best known now as Satan's Blood, this was first given a U.S. VHS release from All American Video under the new title Don't Panic. In the UK, the release of Don't Panic from Colourbox re-used the same poster art as the U.S. release but was actually the 1987 Mexican supernatural slasher film of the same name. To make matters even more confusing, Mogul (parent company of All American, I believe) released a 1984 U.S. slasher film called Satan's Blade (1984) reusing the same exact box art they used for Satan's Blood!

There have been a number of restored DVD releases in recent years, from Mondo Macabro, Scorpion Releasing, Redemption Films (out of the UK) and Media Target Distribution (out of Germany). In 2020, Vinegar Syndrome released a 4K restored Blu-ray, which comes with a 45-minute making of doc called Satan's Blood: Recuerdos de Escalofrío featuring interviews with the director, editor Pedro del Rey and actress Alberti, the only one of the four stars still living.

★★★