De vlieg (1985)

... aka: Fly, The

Directed by:

Hans Heijnen

A year before David Cronenberg made his hit remake of the 1958 Vincent Price classic, we got another fly film not many know about. This one's a 19- minute short from the Netherlands and, unlike the other, more famous Fly horror properties, it does not involve a human turning into an insect monster. Instead, this is a black comedy dealing with normal-sized flies and just how bloody irritating they can be.

I would say the bachelor protagonist (Hans Beijer, who also had a small role in Dick Maas' slasher / mystery Amsterdamned) is a bit of a slob, but seeing how he has dishes piled up on both his oven and his sink and leaves food sitting out until it's festering with maggots, I'd say he's a major slob. As he's sitting down at the table with a newspaper and his breakfast, a fly swarms around his hand and lands on his arm. He hits it with the newspaper. Carry on. As he tries to eat, he hears the same fly buzzing about but can't find it. He goes for a pat of butter, but finds the fly sitting on top. That causes him to knock over a coffee cup. He attempts to blow the fly off the butter but it doesn't budge until he starts swatting his hands around.

Oh well, time to get some work done... well, except this guy's a photographer and the fly decides it's going to ruin all of his shots by landing directly on his camera lens and then refusing to get off. Seeing how swatting it has already failed, the man brings out the heavy artillery: a vacuum cleaner. Somehow, the fly manages to avoid getting sucked up. And it also manages to survive being lured into food traps utilizing strawberry jam and rotting meat and getting smashed with a flyswatter several times and roasted with a lighter. Is this thing even for real? Or is there something else going on here?

This isn't poorly made or anything (there's some OK camerawork and a few fly POV shots thrown in), it just isn't particularly clever and offers up too few surprises, though the last few seconds kind of deliver one. I had much more fun making the poster for this than I did watching it. The director would go on to a career as a documentary filmmaker.

★★

Pick Nick (1977)

... aka: Picnic

... aka: Picknick

Directed by:

Dick Maas

Going to go ahead and continue on with a few more titles from the obscure 1996 VHS release "The Nether Horror Collection", which contains ten horror shorts from Dutch directors (see below for full list). Pick Nick is both the earliest short in the compilation (all of the rest are from the 80s and 90s) and, at 5 minutes, the shortest.

An older man (Cor van Rijn) decides to take his blind wife (Henny Alma) to a surprise location to have a picnic and celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. You can tell right from the get-go that she's not a terribly pleasant woman to be around (perhaps for good reason as the ending certainly attests!) and is already complaining about what they're doing before she even knows what they're doing. The man pulls the car off the main road and parks by some trees; letting her know what a beautiful location he's picked in the forest especially for her. How romantic. There's a bench nearby. He suggests she step out of the car and go have a seat. She, however, is apprehensive and instead makes a dig at him being a failure at his job because he's an alcoholic when he takes a swig of liquor and claims it's lemonade. Her sense of smell is still intact, after all. And if he's going to lie about something so trivial then he'd probably lie about more important things, right?

The two continue the casual bickering. The man seems nervous and starts sweating. And when she asks him to get a scarf out of the trunk for her because she's cold, he hesitates, opens the door, just barely steps out, doesn't actually go to the trunk and then quickly comes back inside. All is eventually revealed with a funny (well, I should say morbidly funny) ending that I won't give away except to say the film uses a lot of tight close-ups and seldom leaves the inside of the car for a reason. While this is kind of a one joke thing, it's a pretty amusing joke, so that's OK.

Maas also made Historia morbi (1975), a 22-minute short about father-and-son serial killers that I had no success in finding (sounds interesting though!) and a number of other shorts prior to making his feature debut with the black comedy Rigor Mortis in 1981. Two years later he made the internationally success killer elevator film The Lift (1983), which was a huge box office hit in Europe and remains one of the most famous Dutch genre films to this day. It became so well-known that the director was even able to get backers to bankroll the higher-budgeted remake Down aka The Shaft (2001) nearly two decades later. It was a flop despite a delayed U.S. home video release hoping to capitalize on Naomi Watts, who starred in it immediately before she became popular. Maas also made the serial killer film Amsterdamned (1988), the killer St. Nick film Saint (2001) and the killer lion film Prey (2006).

★★1/2

Burp! (1986)

Directed by:

Will Wissink

In a dark, seedy area of a big city by some loading docks, a hooker (Tamar Baruch) gets thrown out of a john's car, misses her bus and is forced to wait at the bus stop. Meanwhile, a well-dressed yuppie (Edward Montie) in a nice car gets distracted fiddling with his radio and wrecks by a nearby "telefoon" booth. Unharmed but with his car now out of commission, he attempts to call for help and finds a woman's purse inside; helping himself to the change. Meanwhile, the hooker gets hassled by a trio of punks led by a one-eyed guy with a Mohawk and Coffin Joe fingernails. She punches one, kicks another in the shins multiple times and then uses an aerosol can and lighter to torch the leader while the female punk cheers and takes photos. The stranded motorist kind of stands back and watches the whole thing play out, then jumps back on the phone. It sends out an electric charge, weird noises and scrambled voices start coming out of the receiver, the phone splits apart, sprouts teeth and then shoots out a long tongue that wraps around the guy's neck and pulls him inside and eats him. It then burps. The end.

While this 12-minute Dutch short is well-shot and isn't horribly made or anything, it's not scary, not funny and I never could quite figure out what the whole point was... granted there was a point aside from someone thinking the idea of a killer telephone was enough all by itself. Really just kind of forgettable on the whole.

This was released on VHS in 1996 as part of a short film compilation titled "The Nether Horror Collection" from Haxan Films / Cult Classics out of France. The set also comes with a number of other genre shorts, all from Dutch directors, including Picknick (1977) from Dick Maas (who'd go on to make the surprise hit The Lift and serial killer film Amsterdamned), De Vlieg / "The Fly" (1985) from Hans Heijnen, The Great Rock and Roll Massacre 1 + 2 (1988) from Jan Doense and Phil Van Tongeren, Tjebbo Penning's The Bitch Is Back (1995), about a man being terrorized by a one-liner spouting blow-up sex doll, and five others.

★★

Days of Fury (1980)

... aka: Die Großen Katastrophen (The Great Disasters)
... aka: Doomsday
... aka: Tuomiopäivä (Judgment Day)

Directed by:
Fred Warshofsky

Based on the director's own international best-seller "Doomsday: The Science of Catastrophe," this documentary hopes to paint a morbid picture of a world where "disaster is inevitable and catastrophe, commonplace." Yes folks, it's basically 90 minutes of misery, destruction and death. There are three reasons I'm including this title here. First, it fall into the shockumentary / mondo subgenre and contains a lot of footage intended to shock and disgust. Second, it was released as the unofficial fourth installment of the Faces of Death series in Japan. And finally, the on-screen host and narrator is none other than Vincent Price. Some people act surprised that Price would be involved in a film of questionable taste like this, but those same people have probably forgotten that he'd previously already hosted the early mondo exploitation films Naked Terror (1961) and I tabù (1963 aka Taboos of the World). The film itself is a pretty straight-forward collection of mostly news footage of various natural and man-made disasters and human atrocities, though the sensationalist trailer for the film (featuring charred corpses, animals being killed, etc.) indicates the distributors knew who the true audience would be.

We open with shots of space and talk of the creation of the universe and the Big Bang Theory. This is followed by a segment on volcanoes, where we learn of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée on Martinique, which destroyed the city of Saint-Pierre and killed tens of thousands of people in the process, and then see footage of one of Mt. Etna's destructive eruptions in Sicily. After some shaky footage of tornadoes and tsunamis, we take a trip to the Sahara Desert in Africa and see the devastation of drought, where women spend hours digging in a dried-up river bed for just a cup full of muddy water and human and animal corpses alike lie disregarded in the sand. There's mention of

overpopulation and footage of locust plagues while Price points out that "Life is the ultimate miser." Indeed. Man-made disasters are given about equal screen time here, starting with forest fires caused by careless campers devastating millions of acres of forest and land, leaving behind "charred, mocking reminders of what people once called homes."

Next up we get footage from the Flixborough chemical plant explosion of 1974 in England and several lethal airplane crashes, including footage of corpses being hauled from the wreckage of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 in the Everglades (101 casualties) and footage from the Ermonenville Air Disaster, where Turkish Airlines Flight 981 crashed outside of Paris, killing 346 people and becoming, at the time, the single deadliest airplane crash in history. The record has since been broken. A basket detaches from a hot air balloon, sending the operator plummeting hundreds of feet to his death and, at the Le Mans Grand Prix d'Endurance in 1955, the single worst motorsport accident in history occurred when a crash sent an engine and debris into the grandstands, killing 80 people. Price then rubs salt in the wound by pointing out the irony that race fans aren't so much in it for the thrill of the race but instead the imminent prospect of disaster they're expecting to befall the racers... not themselves!

Baby-seal-clubbing mother fucker!

There's also footage of gas line explosions, the Amico Cadiz oil spill, the Liberian Ocean Eagle crash, the very sad sight of beaches littered with dead birds, fish, dolphins and whales, the senseless slaughter of blue whales turning the seas red, and the difficult-to- watch clubbing of baby harp seals; an act approved by the Canadian government no less! We continue on into rat-infested sewers, see bulldozers pushing mountains of trash, baby chicks being slaughtered by the thousands, the military fighting a blackbird infestation with deadly chemicals, the George Wallace assassination attempt, terrorism at the Egyptian Embassy, the murder of TV reporter Bill Stewart in Nicaragua, riots, civil wars, Japanese farmers fighting the military over a plot of land they hope to build the Tokyo International Airport on, the wind-induced collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940, the Eldfell volcano eruption in Iceland, deadly earthquakes, avalanches and floods and much more.

This bloody footage is in the trailer but was not in the actual film I viewed.

The narration is strongly anti-war, anti-pollution and anti-violence, whilst also being pro-animal and pro-environmental protection, which is likely what appealed to they very conscientious and humane Price and why he decided to take part. We are chastised for being "an energy-greedy world" doing untold damage to the environment to fulfill our "frantic need for oil" and for showing disregard for nature and our fellow man. While there's truth to all of that, the messages here are always at odds with how graphic and exploitative the selected footage is. Then again, it's more effective to criticize with examples of what you're criticizing. But one thing's for sure: this is not at all pleasant to watch. It's grim, depressing and almost apocalyptic in its bleak forecast for the future. Some sort of levity or a smidgen of hope would have helped to balance it all out, but there's none of that to be found here.

The German poster removed an image of the book from the bottom left corner for some reason.

Thankfully, this is packed with information and history and I actually ended up learning quite a bit watching it. Some of the footage is really fascinating and it's a decent document of Mother Nature's wrath as well as the dark and violent nature of mankind. Interestingly, global warming and the pitfalls of our oil dependency; two issues whose importance have only been amplified in today's political circus; are two of the main focal points here. Nowadays, most politicians use these issues as empty rhetoric and many others, in an effort to prove themselves slavishly devoted to whatever party affiliation they align themselves with, seem to take one side or the other while ignoring the gray areas in between. Hey, maybe we are doomed as a society after all!

The executive producer was Doro Vlado Hreljanovic, who also backed Mako: The Jaws of Death (1976), War of the Planets (1977), Just Before Dawn (1981) and others. All of these were theatrically released through the company Picturmedia. To my knowledge, no video or DVD was ever released here in the U.S., but there were ones released in Japan (on numerous labels on both DVD and VHS), the UK (a VHS on the Video Network label) and Germany (a VHS on the Video Medien Pool label).

★★1/2