Stridulum (1979)

... aka: Die Außerirdischen (The Aliens)
... aka: El visitante del más allá (Visitor from Beyond)
... aka: Herdeiros da Morte (Death Heirs)
... aka: Piken fra mørket (The Girl from the Darkness)
... aka: Satans lilla flicka (Satan's Little Girl)
... aka: Visitor, The
... aka: Visitors, The

Directed by:
"Michael J. Paradise" (Giulio Paradisi)

A cloaked figure walks across a sand dune against a bright orange sun and a blue and pink sky as clouds of dust begin to fill the screen and birds fly out. Things then cut to a storyteller clad in a beige robe in a white room telling a story to a bunch of bald children. For a second I thought this was at the St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, but nope this is heaven (or a cosmic equivalent) and the man setting up our tale is none other than Jesus Christ (or a cosmic equivalent) himself, who's played by Franco Nero with a brown beard and a long-haired bleach blonde wig (!) He tells us of an evil alien criminal named Sateen, who managed to escape captivity and head to Earth, where he mutated and developed psychic powers, which he then used to cause destruction and death. The alien commander in charge of apprehending him then sent an army of birds to kill him, which they eventually did, but not before Sateen was able to spread his seed to numerous Earth women who went on to bear evil little children. Oh yes, and he also transformed into an eagle at some point but that doesn't have much to do with anything. The following paragraph is just some of the gonzo nonsense the director and writers decided to fill our heads with during the opening seven minutes. We've still got an hour and a half left to go, so brace yourselves.

Down on Earth, we meet filthy rich Raymond Armstead (a young Lance Henriksen), who owns the "Atlanta Rebels" basketball team. Raymond is dating and planning on marrying divorcée Barbara Collins (Joanne Nail) but there's one little thorn in her side: her horrible 8-year-old daughter Katie (Paige Conner). Katie is such an evil, foul-mouthed, creepy and obnoxious child that mom never wants to bear another for fear it'll turn out just like her! Barbara's intuition turns out to be correct as she's carrying the genes of Sateen and any child she has will also be cursed with supernatural abilities. Meanwhile, a secret society led by Dr. Walker (Mel Ferrer) want to make sure she has a son by any means necessary since she's the last descendant of Sateen. In order to hurry along the process, the bad guys sneak a gun into Katie's birthday party so she'll "accidentally" shoot mum in the back; paralyzing her from the waist down. But even that doesn't spark her desire to wed and pop out another kid, so the society must then take drastic measures.

The "visitor" of the title is Jerzy Colsowicz (John Huston), an elderly emissary sent from the heavens to put a stop to the Sateen bloodline. Somehow that involves congregating on a rooftop with a bunch of bald men carrying boxes, watching specks of light in the sky and getting hired on as a babysitter so he can play a game of Pong (!) with little Katie. Glenn Ford shows up long enough to get his eyes pecked out and then blown up in a car after the demon-alien-girl accuses him of being a child molester and tells him to go fuck himself. Shelley Winters plays a housekeeper / amateur astrologist who carries around an "artificial birdhouse" (don't ask) and, in a hilarious scene, loses her cool and starts vigorously shaking and slapping around the little brat. Director Sam Peckinpah rounds out the surprisingly interesting cast in a useless bit as Barbara's ex-husband, an abortion doctor she goes to out of desperation after being kidnapped by men in Hazmat suits who artificially inseminate her against her will.

While this goes many unusual and often unintentionally hilarious places (the ice rink scene and the scene where Katie makes a basketball hoop explode on Kareem Abdul Jabbar must be seen to be believed), at the end of the day it's just another tale of good vs. evil snatching ideas from numerous other, much better horror and sci-fi flicks (most obviously The Omen and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), mixing them up in a blender and saying "Hey, look at us, we're being original!" Though there are some interesting ideas in the screenplay, the dialogue is hilariously awful and I felt a little guilty watching the talented cast spouting their cringe-worthy, insipid lines and going through scenes that make absolutely zero sense. By the end, Henriksen looks so checked out he doesn't even register a facial expression other than bored after getting stabbed in the throat. Some of the others (particularly the ladies) have been coached to overact wildly and the least said about little Conner's performance the better. Cute accent, though.

I won't sit here and pretend like this is a good film because it's not. However, it is entertaining if you get a kick out of overblown, ineptly-directed train wrecks with major star power and I don't regret watching it. Some of the visuals (particularly at the beginning) are quite arresting, but when everything else going on is so poorly done and laughable, a few striking images here and there are hardly enough to compensate. And for the record, I watched the uncut 108 minute version and not the heavily cut 90 minute print and this thing is still a huge mess even with the restored footage. I had no clue what this film's original title Stridulum referred to either, but apparently it means "whizzing or hissing" in Latin. How that relates to the movie itself is another head-scratcher unless it's referring to the sound of birds flying. "Stridulum" certainly sounds cooler than "Flapping," eh?

There are numerous notable releases for this one. Long after a cut 1982 VHS release from Samuel Goldwyn Home Entertainment and a cut 1989 reissue through United American Video, Code Red got the ball rolling on a DVD release that finally came out in 2010 and was the first time the film was seen uncut here in America. Code Red's package comes with interviews with Nail, Conner, U.S. production manager Stratton Leopold and Italian producer Ovidio G. Assonitis (who also wrote the story), two commentary tracks (one with Nail and the other with Conner, plus moderators Scott Spiegel and Jeff Burr), trailers and so forth. In late 2013, the film received a limited - make that, very limited - theatrical reissue through Drafthouse Films, who have since pushed really hard to try to turn this into some kind of cult film. Apparently it's worked on some genre critics going by a sudden burst of glowing reviews that have emerged since then. All of that was basically orchestrated to move a 2014 Blu ray release from (surprise!) Drafthouse Films, that includes brief interviews with Henriksen, cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri and co-writer Luciano Comici. The interviews themselves shine a spotlight directly on why this turned out to be such a mess.

The score from Franco Micalizzi (available on an RCA soundtrack album) fluctuates from hideously inappropriate TV crime show-style theme music to quite otherworldly and beautiful sci-fi synthesizer beats and is just as schizophrenic and uneven as the rest of the movie. How it's applied to the film itself, however, is mostly a debit. Overuse of thundering and overbearing cues to amateurishly signal whenever something's supposed to be odd or scary becomes almost comical after awhile. Budgeted at around 800,000 dollars (money was chipped in from Samuel Z. Arkoff, Samuel Goldwyn Jr. and others), the majority of shooting took place in Atlanta, Georgia with some interiors done in Italy.

SBIG

Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981)

... aka: Flying Killer - Piranha 2
... aka: Piranha II
... aka: Piranha II: Flying Killers
... aka: Piranha II: The Spawning
... aka: Spawning, The

Directed by:
Ovidio G. Assonitis (uncredited)
James Cameron

There's a lot of gossip and conflicting stories about what went down on this troubled production. Producer / uncredited co-director Ovidio G. Assonitis has stated that James Cameron was fired for doing a terrible job and threatening to send them way over budget. Cameron stated he was fired after a couple of weeks but only because Assonitis was a control freak who gave him no room to work; suggesting the producer wanted to direct the film all along and intentionally hired someone inexperienced just so he could quickly cast them aside and do as he pleased. Producer Jeff Schechtman (whose story may be closest to the truth) confirms that Cameron was possibly overextending the budget but also stated the problems were really Assonitis' fault as he was "a major pain in the ass" to work with. Though the direction is credited solely to Cameron due to early contractual agreements, he claims to have had no hand in editing the film, no hand in writing the screenplay and essentially no further involvement with the movie at all after his firing early on. In other words, the finished product is mostly the work of Assonitis, who really should thank his lucky stars Cameron's name is signed to this project because otherwise it would have been long forgotten by now.

The three stars are Tricia O'Neil (who reminded me a lot of Adrienne Barbeau), Lance Henriksen and Steve Marachuk. O'Neil is Anne Kimbrough, a divorced single mother with marine biology training working as a scuba instructor at an upscale resort hotel called Club Elysium somewhere in the Caribbean. Henriksen is local police chief Steve Kimbrough; Anne's ex-husband and father to her only son (Ricky Paull Goldin). Marachuk is Tyler Sherman, who starts out wooing Anne as one of her students but then reveals himself to be a biochemist who was involved in a top secret project that involved splicing genes from various types of fish to create "the ultimate killing machine." A cargo ship containing four canisters of fertilized eggs from the project sunk and even since people have mysteriously disappeared around the wreck. Hmmm... Either way, someone told O'Neil, Henriksen and Marachuk they were starring in a serious horror film and they all act accordingly. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the rest of the cast that and they ham it up unmercifully.

The roster of ridiculous supporting characters (many of whom seem to have been re-dubbed and thus come off even sillier than they already do) include: 1. A sexually voracious woman who more or less date rapes her boyfriend underwater before both are gobbled up by the fish. 2. A flamboyant resort owner (Ted Richert) who insists on being a judge for the "Mr. Muscle" contest and refuses to cancel a midnight "fish fry" despite the ever-rising body count. 3. An obnoxious millionaire who knows nothing about boats but demands being called "Captain" and his big-breasted teen daughter (Leslie Graves). 4. A pair of freeloading tramps who sunbathe topless on their yacht. 5. A stuttering, geeky cook #4 like to torment with sexual come-ons they have no intentions of carrying through with. 6. A frizzy-haired New Yawk single obsessed with ensnaring a rich husband to the point where she pretends to drown so a dentist will save her. 7. A Jamaican dynamite fisherman who avenges his dead son by standing still and just letting the fish kill him. 8. A horny old cougar who attempts to get a "casual encounter" out of a lifeguard by telling him she killed her ex-husband with too much sex. And there are others just as silly.

The main gimmick here is that the killer fish (which are technically grunion and not even piranha despite the title) can fly. Yes, FLY. They can flutter their wings, leap right out of the water, fly right at you and chew your face off. They can also survive long periods of time out of water; a skill really only used once when one hops out of a corpse to chew up a black female morgue attendant. The real money shot here should have been mass carnage at the finale where the fish start attacking all of the dumb hotel staff / guests we've been introduced to throughout the film. Unfortunately, it's over before it can even get any good. Alexandre Aja's Piranha 3D (2010) is supposedly a "remake" of the original film but actually has much more in common with this sequel. Its blood-soaked finale with dozens upon dozens of annoying Spring Breakers getting slaughtered in gruesome ways is exactly how this film should of ended but doesn't. There's simply not enough payoff.

Joe Dante's original PIRANHA (1978) was a wonderful JAWS-inspired low-budgeter that ended up becoming very successful, so it's no surprise at all this sequel was green lit. However, while the original mixed horror and comedy seamlessly, this film does it rather horribly and almost seems like two parallel films going on at once; a goofy resort comedy and a serious creature feature. The three leads are all pretty good and hold up their end but the humorous elements are much broader, much dumber and much more aggressively campy that in the original. This is also sleazier, with ample T&A provided by a host of women, including Carole Davis (who was a 1980 Penthouse Pet under the name "Tamara Kapitas") and Connie Lynn Hadden (a 1981 Pet). Graves, who began her career on "Sesame Street" (!), had appeared nude in Oui magazine around this same time, though she gets to keep her clothes on here. There are also some gory moments courtesy of Giannetto De Rossi, who is best known for his work with Lucio Fulci.

For the record there are no less than three different cuts of this film in circulation with run times ranging from 84 to 94 minutes. There are not only changes in the editing and Stelvio Cipriani's music score depending on the version you watch but also changes in the scene order. The shorter version has also omitted almost all of the nudity and some of the gore. The Columbia/Tri-Star DVD release, which presents the widescreen film in full screen, is one of the worst transfers I've ever seen from a "reputable" major company.

★1/2