Nekeddo burâddo: Megyaku (1996)

... aka: Megyaku: Akuma no yorokobi - itai no ga suki
... aka: Naked Blood
... aka: Naked Blood: Megyaku
... aka: Splatter: Naked Blood

Directed by:
Hisayasu Sato

While conducting "brain secretion research,"  17-year-old budding scientist Eije Kure (Sadao Abe) has created the "ultimate painkiller for human beings" that he names "Myson." The problem? He has no one to test its effectiveness on. Thankfully, his scientist mother Yuki (Masumi Nakao) is conducting her own experiments in contraception to help curb overpopulation. She pays three young women; Rika Mikami (Misa Aika), who for some reason written off as a "psychological shock" doesn't need to sleep, and two others known only as "Vain Woman" (Mika Kirihara) and "Gluttonous Woman" (Yumika Hayashi) for obvious reasons, to take part in the harmless test. Well, harmless untl Eije sneaks into the research center and, unbeknownst to his mom or the test subjects, taints each of their iv bags with his experimental drug. Each girl is given it, go on their way and are instructed to come back in a week. Eije's drug won't be kicking in for another 48 hours, so he decides to start following the girls around to document the progress with his video camera.

Rika catches Eije stalking her and the would-be scientist discovers that she is mighty odd herself. Because of her extreme insomnia, Rika's hearing has become extremely sensitive to the point where she can hear what small animals and even plants are saying. It's a language she doesn't understand and it's driving her crazy, so she doesn't get out much and her only sanctuary is her small apartment. She keeps a cactus there because they never talk and has a special sleeping contraption and virtual reality headset so she and her potted friend can share "dreams of the heart" together. Meanwhile, the other two girls who were part of the experiment start showing strange side effects. The vain girl starts jabbing pins in her ears and the gluttonous one cuts her finger with a knife, covers her hand in tempura batter, dips it a pot of boiling oil and then bites off her finger. As it turns out, the drug Eije had given them has a way of turning extreme pain into extreme pleasure. It's a pleasure so strong and irresistible that the girls cannot help but to keep mutilating themselves...

Naked Blood has a reputation as being an extreme gore-fest but during the slow and somewhat bland first 50 minutes you may start wondering "Where's the disgusting gore?" Well, rest assured, it finally does come. A girl jams various sharp objects through her arm and turns herself into a human pincushion (in a scene clearly copying Return of the Living Dead III), another sticks a fork and knife up her hoo-ha and starts eating pieces of it, a nipple is cut off and eaten, a torso is sliced wide open and a man climbs inside (?), blood sprays out all over the place when a throat is cut and, during the most memorably icky moment, an eyeball is speared with a fork, pulled out and eaten. The fx are pretty good but, gruesome moments aside, I ultimately became annoyed at how much of this wasn't making sense. It begins with a rather straight-forward narrative (granted you can accept the whole 'sharing a dream world with a cactus' thing) then during the last half hour goes off in such a bizarre, would-be "profound" direction that even most fans of the film are left scratching their heads. A man walks along the beach, sees a shining light and simply disappears into thin air, only to later return as a ghost... I think. What's going on with the drug may not actually be what's going on with the drug... or maybe it is. Certain aspects are perhaps hallucinations or nightmares but after awhile I simply stopped caring. Random weirdness for the sake of random weirdness doesn't bother some viewers out there, but it usually just leaves me feeling dissatisfied by the end, which is pretty much the case here.

Prolific director Sato also made the sadistic pinku Lolita: Vibrator Torture (1987), the vampire film Love-O=Infinity (1994) and one of four shorts in the horror anthology Rampo Noir (2005). Most of his other movies appear to be fixated on rather unsavory topics like torture, rape, incest, necrophilia, snuff movies and even bestiality. From what I've learned about the director's overall body of work, Naked Blood (a partial remake of Sato's earlier film Bôkô honban aka Rape: For Real) appears to be one of his more accessible films. I'm sure morbid curiosity is going to eventually get the better of me and have me checking out more of this guy's stuff. DVD is from Discotek Media.

★★1/2

Initiation, The (1984)

Directed by:
Larry Stewart

It started with fifteen and now it's down to just four. Who said being a sorority pledge was easy? It's definitely not when you're a sorority pledge in a horror flick. First you have to get naked and then you have to die. Sorry ladies, but those are the rules. At the mercy of mean pledge leader Megan (Frances Peterson), the latest crop of new inductees at the Delta Rho Chi house has been narrowed down to just a few. There's virtuous nice girl Marcia (Marilyn Kagan), slutty Alison ("Deborah Morehart" aka future soap opera star Hunter Tylo), reluctant Beth (Paula Knowles) and the troubled Kelly (Daphne Zuniga). Kelly has been having a recurring nightmare featuring a little girl walking in on her parents having sex and then stabbing her dad before another man barges and is accidentally caught on fire. 300 miles away, we pay a visit to the Fireside Sanitarium; a place full of cliché horror movie nutcase behavior. Moving down our checklist, we can mark off "Woman staring at a turned-off TV screen," "Woman pretending to knit" "Man who drools and licks the walls" "Woman sucking thumb and staring at a pencil," "Woman whose face we never see because she figures into the plot" and of course that old stand-by "Guy in football helmet hitting himself on the head with a ping pong paddle over and over again." A man (Robert Dowdell) with serious fire damage to his face and body lurks around outside clutching a three-pronged garden claw. He sneaks in later that night to let all of the patients out. Someone murders the bitchy Nurse Ratched wanna-be and steals her car.

Because of her nightmares, graduate student / psychology professor Peter Adams (James Read), who's working on his "doctorate in parapsychology," begins hooking Kelly up to machinery and trying to analyze her "classic Freudian dream." He and his research assistant (Joy Jones) soon come to the conclusion that this isn't a nightmare, but a flashback. It seems Kelly's wealthy parents; Frances (Vera Miles) and Dwight (Clu Gulager) Fairchild, have been hiding a few things from their daughter. Dad doesn't get to relay much info because he's stabbed and decapitated with a machete when he tries to sneak off to see his mistress. Mom, however, doesn't want her daughter being examined or for her to see Peter any more for fear that the secret will be revealed. Either way, whoever escaped from the nuthouse is lurking around and ready to spill some blood... and just in time for the big sorority initiation. Their final challenge is to break into Kelly's father's department store (which is actually more like a multi-level office building) and somehow get their hands on the night watchman's uniform. But that's OK. As Alison points out, he's rumored to be "a real stud hung like a mule or something." Too bad he's pronged to death before they get to find out for sure.

Kelly, Marcia and Alison are all locked in the store, Megan and three frat guys sneak inside in an attempt to scare them and the killer shows up to do them all in. There's death by axe to the head, arrow, slit throat and a garden variety stabbing. One girl confesses being raped by her violin teacher when she was 12 years old and then trades one traumatic sexual experience for another when the first guy she willingly gives herself to is shot dead with a harpoon gun immediately afterward. The melted-faced groundskeeper shows up, as does another surprise guest. After his assistant hits the library to do some research, Peter rushes to the Fairchild home to alert Frances and then to the mall in an effort to save Kelly.

The Initiation is yet another interchangeable, forgettable slasher flick from the early 80s. Production values, score and photography are all OK, and there's enough blood, death and nudity for one of these things, but the storyline is far too predictable and whatever twists it has to offer up are poorly telegraphed in advance. Even the attempt for a last-minute shock is pretty easy to figure out. The acting is all over-the-place; ranging from OK (Miles, Gulager, Read) to flat out terrible (most of the younger cast). Though clearly still in need of some experience before the cameras, star Zuniga is pretty and appealing enough. She seemed poised for stardom after snagging lead roles in the popular teen comedy The Sure Thing (1986) and the successful Star Wars spoof Spaceballs (1987) right after this, but the string of poor / mediocre films - Last Rites (1988), The Fly II (1989), Gross Anatomy (1989) - that followed doomed her to TV work thereafter. She's probably now best known for her role on the nighttime soap Melrose Place.

★★

Crimson Cult, The (1968)

... aka: Black Horror: le messe nere
... aka: Crimson Altar, The
... aka: Curse of the Crimson Altar
... aka: Curse of the Crimson Cult
... aka: Reincarnation, The
... aka: Spirit of the Dead
... aka: Witch House, The

Directed by:
Vernon Sewell

Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele and Michael Gough all in one horror film? Pinch me, I'm dreaming. Directed by the same man who brought us the ho hum Ghost Ship (1952) and the atrocious THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR (1968), which star Peter Cushing claimed was his worst-ever horror film in interviews? I guess I'll keep my expectations low. Following the opening credits is a quote from an unnamed "Medical Journal" which tells us that the combination of hallucinogenic drugs and hypnosis may "induce the subject to perform actions he may not normally commit." This is immediately followed by a Satanic black mass set in a green-lit dungeon featuring a topless blonde with strategically placed hair getting whipped by a dominatrix wearing pasties, a woman holding a chicken, a man with a goat and a muscle man blacksmith prepping a red hot branding iron. Steele, looking extremely striking in green face paint and a feathered ram's horn headdress, pops in and announces herself as "Lavinia, Keeper of the Black Secret" in an echo voice. She instructs Peter Manning (Denys Peek) on what he needs to do, which is sign his soul away to Satan, stab the blonde sacrifice and then get branded to seal their pact.

After receiving an odd letter from Peter, his brother Robert (Mark Eden), who runs an antique shop in London, decides to head on down to Greymarshe to see if he can locate his missing sibling. He's just in time for "Witch's Night;" an annual celebration in the area that involves games, fireworks, a burning of a witch effigy and, of course, parties. While driving down an old country road he runs right into a panicked blonde in a pink mesh body stocking being chased by a car. That turns out to just be a "sophisticated game of hide and seek." On to Craxted Lodge he goes, where a wild shindig is well underway. Young folks guzzle down champagne, smoke weed and dance, and this happens to be the second 1968 British horror film I've seen in a week to contain body painting (the other being CORRUPTION), which must have been the in-thing in swingin' Brit culture at the time. Robert runs into the blonde again. She introduces herself as Eve (Virginia Wetherell) and she's the niece of the man Robert came there to see; J.D. Morley (Lee).

Despite numerous clues suggesting the contrary, J.D. claims to have never seen Robert's brother, but offers up a place for Robert to the next few days while he searches for him. John Marshe (Karloff), a professor, witchcraft expert and collector of instruments of torture, shows up in a wheelchair to tell our hero all about the witch and explains that there's always been a link between those who burnt Lavinia at the stake in 1652 and those who've mysteriously died in the area. While staying in Craxted, Robert keeps receiving warnings to get out from neurotic dim-wit butler Elder (a wasted Gough) and then starts having bizarre nightmares involving psychedelic / kaleidoscopic swirls, his brother calling out to him and Lavinia trying to force him to sign a book in blood before stabbing him. After one such dream, he even wakes with a real wound on his arm. Robert, with help from Eve, must piece together the clues before he ends up just like his dearly departed brother.

Things look very good thanks to talented cinematographer John Coquillon and all of the actors do what they can but there's only so much that can be done to try to overcome a poor screenplay and a certain overworked, predictable blandness this entire film possesses. Neither the plot nor the characters are adequately developed and the ending feels rushed in how it attempts (and fails) to tie up all the loose ends. Steele, who looks fantastic and is just perfect in these kind of roles, and Karloff, who is given most of the humorous lines, probably come off best amongst the principles, though they, Lee and Gough are strictly supporting players despite the billing order. While shooting this in January, 1968 under freezing conditions, supposedly poor Boris (who was 81 years old at the time) developed pneumonia and never quite recovered from it. That makes frigid outdoor scenes of the feeble actor - steam exiting his mouth after each line - more than just a little sad to sit through.

Curse of the Crimson Altar first hit U.S. theaters in 1970 under the title The Crimson Cult. For this initial American release, some of the kinkier moments (like the lady with the whip) and Wetherell's brief nude scenes were removed so it could secure a PG rating. All of those scenes have since been reinserted for the DVD version. Though the credits say it was based on a story by Jerry Sohl, it's actually partially based on H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Dreams in the Witch House." The cast also includes Rupert Davies in a brief role as a vicar, Rosemarie Reede as a secretary, Michael Warren as Basil, a mute, black-clad man in sunglasses who pushes Karloff's character around and Roger Avon as a skeptical police sergeant.

It was made for executive producer Tony Tenser's Tigon British Film Productions, who tried to compete with what rivals Amicus and Hammer were up to at the same time with such films as THE SORCERERS (1967) starring Karloff, Witchfinder General (1968) starring Vincent Price, THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR (1970), Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) with Linda Hayden, DOOMWATCH (1972) and THE CREEPING FLESH (1973) with Cushing and Lee.

★★