La nave de los monstruos (1960)

...aka: Nave del mostri, La
...aka: Ship of Monsters, The

Directed by:

Rogelio A. González

Never released in the United States and also never dubbed or subtitled in English, this crazy little B-movie is still well worth checking out even if you don't understand the language. Voluptuous Venusian beauties Gamma (Ana Bertha Lepe) and Beta (Lorena Velázquez) are sent by their Queen (Consuelo Frank) across the galaxy to gather male specimens to help repopulate their planet. After having some problems with their spaceship, they're forced to crash land on Earth and end up in a small Mexican town. The first person they run across is amiable singing cowboy Lauriano (Eulalio González); a widower with a young son who seems to spend most of his time riding around on a horse or hanging out in the local saloon. Also aboard the ship is a big, specially-equipped cardboard-box robot named Tor as well as four different kinds of monsters. One is a little alien with a giant head, giant eyes and an giant exposed brain. There's also a scaly cyclops, something that looks like a giant spider with flexible arms and a lizard with pinchers. The monster designs are pretty great in a cheap movie kind of way and better yet, all of the monsters talk! I had no idea what any of them were saying, but the voices were hilarious.

While Gamma and Lauriano start getting romantic, the evil Beta is up to more devious things. She turns out to be some kind of vampire who turns into a giant flying bat at one point, attacks a man and sucks his blood! She also seems power-mad and eventually unleashes the monsters into the town. One of them eats a cow! Another beats a horse to death! Things lead up to a climax which features an impalement, an eyeball exploding when hit with a rock shot out of a slingshot, a melting head and one of the monsters being set on fire! Not enough for ya? The alien babes also have plenty of gadgets at their disposal, including plastic ray guys that shoot fire, a teleportation device and a box that can freeze people. And in addition to being a cheap horror/sci-fi film with shoddy effects and comic sound effects, it's also a musical, with three songs being performed by our hero, as well as a song-and-dance number set in a foggy cave.

The lead actor (apparently a famous comedian in Mexico) seems almost like Mexico's answer to Gene Autry here, except he has a personality and his acting isn't wooden. The lead actresses both look good and seem to be having fun, especially the lovely Velázquez, who is best known in America for starring in a series of cult classic "Wrestling Women" flicks. The effects are silly as can be and enjoyable (some of the better space shots were actually swiped from a 1958 Russian film) and there's some pretty good cartoonish set design, particularly the interiors of the spaceship. I wouldn't even consider this "so bad it's good" because it seems well aware of what it is the entire time and doesn't take itself seriously. Hell, during the opening credits, they even list all the "monsters of the galaxy" (Uk, Utirr, Tagual, Tor and Zok) along with the human actors. And it ends with a duet being performed by the robot and a jukebox! Fun stuff.

★★1/2

Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, The (1959)

Directed by:
Edward L. Cahn

I'm sure this one freaked out or shocked quite a few people back in 1959! Over a century ago, Captain Wilfred Drake and troops slaughtered the male population of an entire South American headhunter tribe, save for one witch doctor, who effectively placed a curse on the Drake family. Ever since, each male member has mysteriously died of a heart attack at the age of sixty. Strangely, at some point, the heads of each body have been removed and the skulls later returned to the family crypt. Haunted by visions of floating skulls, Jonathan Drake (Eduard Franz) seems to be next in line after his brother Kenneth (Paul Cavanagh) becomes victim number three. Mysterious Swiss archaeologist Dr. Emil Zurich (Henry Daniell) - an expert in Amazon tribes and customs - is orchestrating all of this with help from tall, skinny, wrinkly Zutai (Paul Wexler), a witch doctor. Zutai uses a thin metal blade dipped in curare to paralyze victims before removing their heads with a bamboo knife. The heads are then brought back to Dr. Zurich's lab, where the skulls are removed and the heads are shrunk using hot sand. After Jonathan is attacked and almost killed, police lieutenant Jeff Rowan (Grant Richards) and Jonathan's daughter Alison (Valerie French) try to get to the bottom of things.

Though limited in budget, and with a few cardboard performances, this is still a fairly enjoyable effort with an imaginative premise, decent b/w photography and some rather ghoulish content for its time. Veteran B-movie director Edward L. Cahn (best known for IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE, which went on to influence the hit ALIEN) keeps things moving at a pretty fast pace and doesn't shy away from showing gruesome things such as headless corpses and decapitated heads. The creepy Zutai character, who has dark wrinkly skin, stitched-up lips and poisonous blood, runs around in sandals made of human flesh and leaves behind fingerprints containing tiny skull imprints, is the most interesting character. The performances are uneven, but Daniell does a pretty good job as the cultured bad guy, who may or may not actually be a ghost. Worth watching.

★★1/2

Homebodies (1974)

Directed by:
Larry Yust

Looking for something different? Then look no further! HOMEBODIES is an absolute gem of a film that has unfortunately become difficult to find over the years. In fact, it's been released on a home viewing format in the States just one time - in 1984 - by Embassy Home Entertainment. Now that the tape is 25-years-old, I think it's about time someone rescued this one from complete obscurity and put it out on DVD already. Why we need a dozen special edition reissues of films like "Friday the 13th Part 20" and a great film like this is able to slip through the cracks is something I'll never quite understand.
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In Cincinnati, Ohio, a construction company is busy at work erecting a huge skyscraper. Across the street, the city has condemned a block of tenement buildings. One by one, the buildings are being demolished after its elderly citizens are dragged from the comfort of their homes to live in some colorless, sanitized new apartment home against their wishes. However, the tenants of one of the buildings set to be torn down are not going down without a fight. This is, after all, their home we're talking about. They've been living there 30 years. And since no one seems to care about them and their welfare, why should they return the favor? Mattie (Paula Trueman), who spends her days sitting by the construction site munching on prunes, witnesses a fatal accident and then conspires with her friends to rig similar accidents to delay the destruction of their home. One thing leads to another and before long they're resorting to stabbing a cold social worker and burying a wealthy land developer alive in wet cement! One could accuse the film of being far-fetched, but most dark comedies are, and the film manages to skillfully blend social drama, horror and black comedy together in an entertaining, thought-provoking and unique way.

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One of the big pluses here is that the plight of the low-income elderly is shown in a grim, though very realistic and plausible, light. These people are often bullied, pushed around and treated if they don't matter, so despite their murderous schemes, there's never a moment where we don't identify with, and sympathize for, the people involved. Another huge plus is the cast and level of characterization. Many genre filmmakers mistakenly believe the target audience for these films only want to see hot young things strutting their stuff, not a bunch of senior citizens. They're wrong. Here we get six veteran character actors capable of adding those intangibles to their roles that only come with experience.

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Trueman as the spunky, unpredictable and increasingly more unstable Mattie seems to be the centerpiece of the film and she does an excellent job. Just as good are Ian Wolfe as the building superintendent, Ruth McDevitt as his wife (also the conscience of the group), William Hansen as a widowed writer, blind Peter Brocco and Frances Fuller as a wig-wearing agoraphobic who still talks to her dead husband and hasn't left the building in 20 years. Each of the performers bring a human element to their role, and the characters aren't just tenants. They're created their own little microcosm in the building and each depend on one another in equal measure to simply get by. To disrupt their environment is to destroy their lives, so why should they care if a bunch of greedy big wigs or whoever else go down with them? Co-stars Douglas Fowley, Linda Marsh and veteran horror/sci-fi star Kenneth Tobey as the construction boss also deliver fine performances in less-sympathetic roles.

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Quirky, unique, thoughtful, very well-written, directed and acted on a modest budget; this independently-produced film is probably not going to be for all tastes, but for fans of both horror flicks and black comedies, I can't recommend this one enough. It's worth the search.

Score: 8.5 out of 10

Dark Echoes (1977)

...aka: Curse of Captain Ghor, The

...aka: Dark Echo

...aka: Deep Echo

...aka: Maldiocao de Ghor, A

Directed by:

George Robotham

What we have here is an extremely hard-to-find Austrian / Hungarian / Yugoslavian 'underwater ghost / zombie' flick that, to my knowledge, was never released legitimately on DVD or VHS anywhere other than Argentina (who had a video released many years back through TVE), Poland (thanks for the info Humanoid!) and either Brazil or Portugal (judging by the Portuguese subtitles on the print I watched). I also can't find any verification online about whether it ever played theatrically or not. It's one of those movies that doesn't seem to have a poster or a video cover anywhere online. In fact, there isn't even very much information about this title over on IMDb either. Dark Echoes is very slow-going and is probably of minimal interest to most because of that, but still has some merit and parts of it are quite interesting. And since there actually weren't that many zombie movies released during the 1970s (LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE, DAWN OF THE DEAD and ZOMBI 2 being the three major ones), it's probably worth a look for die-hard zombie movie completists.

Watching a combination of American, British and European (French, Hungarian, German...) actors filling out the cast, all of whom speak English with varying degrees of success, makes it a bit hard to get a feel for the location. The plot (which reminded me of the later The Fog) involves a series of mysterious murders plaguing a small, lakeside village in Austria. The local police (headed by Wolfgang Brook) are aided in their investigation by American psychic Bill Cross (Joel Fabiani), local writer Lisa Brueckner (Karin Dor) and others. The killer turns out to be a skull-faced zombie / ghost sea captain who resides in wreckage at the bottom of the lake during the day but sneaks up to the village at night to kill off the descendants of those responsible for his death years earlier. There's also some old backwoods witch with a raven on her shoulder who secretly leads a cult of young villagers. These scenes didn't seem to have a lot to do with the main plot but they're colorful and do provide some gratuitous nudity.

First, the negatives...

- It takes about an hour to actually get a good look at the killer, and the first introduction of it (which should have been jarring) is a bit fumbled.

- It's extremely talky and some of the dialogue is terrible.

- The 'idiot plot' syndrome rears its ugly head quite a few times, especially when Dor's character - one of the killer's targets - is left alone out in the middle of a field while a mob goes off into the woods chasing after the killer.

- It's lacking in blood / gore aside from one underwater stabbing and a gory decapitation.

Now on to the better stuff...

- The acting is decent.

- It's well photographed, including some decent underwater photography.

- The village setting is atmospheric, and good use is made out of crumbling old buildings.

- The music score is excellent.

- The zombie design (from John Chambers and Tom Burman) is actually really good.

- Despite the fact the zombie is kept off screen until near the end, the POV camerawork of a growling, heavy-breathing killer is well done and creepy.

- Several of the deaths, while lacking blood, are still effective, including a woman pushed out of a window and landing on a rocky embankment below.

And finally a little bit of trivia...

The director was born in Germany, relocated to the US where he played on UCLA's football team and then went on to work in Hollywood as a stunt double for the likes of Rock Hudson, Clark Gable and John Wayne. Dark Echoes marks his first and only film as director. He was married to lead actress Dor from 1988 until his death last year from Alzheimer's complications last year.

★★

La setta (1991) [filmed in 1990]

... aka: Demons 4
... aka: Demons IV: The Sect

... aka: Devil's Daughter, The

... aka: La secta
... aka: Sect, The

Directed by:

Michele Soavi

I'm through with Michele Soavi! Through with his horror-ography, that is. Finally seen them all, from the 1985 documentary Dario Argento's World of Horror to 1994's Cemetery Man. It always feels good to see everything a director has to offer, right? My last watch is his 1991 film La setta aka The Sect, which was filmed over a two month period starting in September 1990 so it can be included here. The film was released here in America under an awful and misleading title I don't even want to type out again. There are some awesome visuals in here, along with nicely done production design courtesy of Massimo Antonello Geleng, excellent cinematography from Raffaele Mertes and a great score composed by Pino Donaggio. In addition, this thing is filled with perplexing, off-the-wall ideas that will make most viewers go "WTF?!," but, I think, in a good way. It's the first time I recall seeing a woman getting raped by a bird or a bunny rabbit using a remote control, that's for sure!

Unfortunately, like most of Michele's other movies, the dialogue is diabolical(ly awful), some of the lead actors are terrible and much of the story seems swiped from a popular movie directed by Roman Polanski. I'm sure you've heard of it before. While Polanski's film was a solid piece of work from top to bottom, Soavi's can be referred to as "ROSEMARY'S BABY: All dressed up with no place to go." Sometimes I get the impression that certain directors try to be weird for the sake of being weird, but lack the focus or talent to bring it all together in a cohesive, satisfying way, and Soavi has seemed to straddle that fence throughout his career.

Things start with a bunch of hippies (cue "Horse With No Name") being killed by cult members in California during the 1970s before jumping ahead 20 years to Frankfurt, Germany. Jamie Lee Curtis' sister Kelly Curtis stars in this one as an emotionally unstable school teacher. You can certainly see a family resemblance, though Kelly is more beautiful in my humble opinion. The major difference between the two is that Jamie Lee can act and Kelly cannot. Herbert Lom co-stars (and gives one of the film's only good performances) as an elderly, dying man Curtis almost runs over and then lets stay in her home. Lom carries around a mystery box he won't let anyone else touch, keeps drinking water and has special drops he keeps putting into his eyes. He sneaks a beetle into a sleeping Curtis' nose and from then on out things go all kinds of bat shit weird as her tap water turns an unnatural color of blue, her pet bunny starts watching TV, a piece of cloth starts trying to smother people, she starts hallucinating about wind chimes and a long tunnel leading about a mile underground is found in a secret room in her cellar (which she didn't know was there despite being in the home for eight months).

Describing the plot or trying to make sense out of it, is pretty much fighting an uphill battle, but it's best to describe this one as the aforementioned Rosemary's Baby spiced up with odd, sometimes surreal flourishes. There's a cult at work here, and Curtis is the innocent target, and people she knows and trusts are actually conspiring against her and the birth of the Antichrist may be a chief objective of the bad guys and, yeah, you know the rest. The ending tries to tie it all together, but it's muddled and lacking in motivation. The film is devoid of the characterization, strong performances, suspense, increasing paranoia and claustrophobia of Polanski's movie, even though there's plenty to enjoy from a strictly visual standpoint. But at the end of the day, it did manage to keep me both interested and entertained throughout.

La Setta was written by Soavi, Dario Argento (also one of three producers) and some other chap and features supporting performances from Euro horror regulars Mariangela Giordano (Peter Bark's generous mama in Burial Ground) as Curtis' friend, Giovanni Lombardo Radice (aka John Morghen aka the guy who doesn't really like horror flicks but gets typecast in them anyway) as a guy who cuts out a woman's heart for some reason or another, Tomas Arana (star of Soavi's The Church) as a bearded cult leader, Donald O'Brien (Dr. Butcher, Medical Deviate) and more. Soavi appears in a cameo on a TV set and supposedly Daria Nicolodi is in it (at least according to IMDb), even though I don't recall seeing her anywhere.

A brief overview of the films of Michele Soavi:

Il mondo dell'orrore di Dario Argento (Dario Argento's World of Horror) (1985) - Ironically, this documentary about the films of that other popular Italian director (whom Soavi obviously is heavily inspired by and used to work for) is among my favorite of Soavi's work. It's very well done. ★★★

The Valley (1985) - A horror-ific 4-minute music video for Bill Wyman's piece from Argento's Phenomena, complete with a young Jennifer Connelly. Cheese-city baby, even for the 80s. ★1/2

Deliria (Stage Fright) (1987) - Sometimes visually interesting, but otherwise routine Italian slasher (or "giallo" if you think everything made in Italy involving a killer is a giallo). It's been awhile since I last saw this one, but it didn't wow me much when I did. I may give it a re-watch sometime. ★★1/2

La chiesa (The Church) (1989) - An excellent first half (including a great period-set prologue of Teutonic knights slaughtering villagers) becomes way too silly in the second as a bunch of annoying people become trapped in an ancient cathedral where demons take over. Strong visuals and score, but indifferent acting, leaden pacing and poor dialogue keep it from greatness. There's also a silly direct copy of a scene from ROSEMARY'S BABY. Does Soavi love that movie, or what? ★★1/2

La setta (The Sect) (1991) - Looking over my other ratings, apparently I saved the best of Soavi's horror flicks - which seems to be his least talked about, for last. Color my surprised. ★★★

Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man) (1994) - I could write a thesis paper on the many ways this film simultaneously irritates me and leaves me colder than the corpses Rupert Everett keeps taking down, but I'll pass. ★★

*Mr. Soavi has seemed to turn his attention to Italian made-for-TV movies in recent years. I'm not sure if any of those qualify as "horror" or not.

In defense of veteran horror filmmakers/icons...

I've recently noticed a lot of director bashing going on, so I just wanted to throw my two cents in... Of course, this is all my personal opinion on some of the most talked-about horror filmmakers...

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Say what you want, but Dario Argento's Mother of Tears was greatly entertaining to me personally. Yes it's fairly stupid (then again, so was Suspria), but some of the old magic - more prevalent in MOT than it has been since 1987's Opera - is still there. I also like The Stendhal Syndrome quite a bit, but MOT is undoubtedly more fun to watch. I also might enjoy it a bit more than Inferno, just because the tone of Inferno has always rubbed me the wrong way even though it's far classier and artier than MOT could ever dream of being. So for what it's worth, MOT renews my faith in Argento after being disappointed in most of his newer offerings.

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Again, say what you want but I will continue to defend and admire George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead. People expect a lot out of George. I do, too, since Night and Dawn are two of my favorite horror movies. I was let down by Land, I hated Bruiser, so I was about over Romero before I watched this, but Diary has single handedly renewed my interest in him. In my opinion, it's his best film since the late 70s. The immediacy found in early Romero but lost to budget over the years has been found once again with his newest, lower-budgeted effort. It's also a hell of a lot better and more ambitious than either Cloverfield or [REC].

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It seems Wes Craven does a movie or two each decade that's obscenely popular and hugely influence. In the 70s it was Last House (or The Hills Have Eyes), in the 80s it was A Nightmare on Elm Street and the 90s it was Scream. I hated Cursed, but Red Eye wasn't the end of the world. I still have faith in Wes as a director, as he seems to at least knock one out of the park every ten years or so, with some interesting moments in between.

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I also don't really get the Tobe Hooper bashing. In my opinion, he's made more quality horror films than John Carpenter has. Carpenter's The Thing seems to be a rare film whose popularity transcends generations (the high amount of gore and its reliance on special effects a likely reason), while Hooper's TCM seems to be less impressive to the younger generation; many of whom proudly proclaim the remake or "The Beginning" is better. Personally, I think TCM is superior to anything Carpenter has done, but that's me.

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I've never been a huge Stephen King fan but it's futile to critize someone so important to the genre over the past 30 years. I do enjoy some of his novels (though he's far from my favorite), and have enjoyed many films based on his writings; Carrie, The Dead Zone, Cujo, Misery, The Shining, etc. I don't think anyone I listed above deserves to be called a "hack."

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I really can't comment much on the likes of Alexandre Aja, Rob Zombie, Eli Roth or whatever flavor of the month people seem to be obsessing over as they have not made enough films and perhaps need time to discover themselves. I'll just say that all have kept me at arm's length so far. I see some promise at times, but they've all fallen short of being able to impress me with any of their films and I already see a lot of repetition from them. If you look back at the likes of Romero, Craven, Hooper, Argento, Mario Bava, etc. you will notice they all struck gold and made revolutionary films right out of the gate, which are what ensured they'd even had careers in the first place. In other words, they achieved success the hard way - by earning it. If they'd made a couple of awful films to start as most of these new guys do, who knows if they'd even have the opportunity to make a third...

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Many of today's genre filmmakers have careers based on hype and image, not on talent. If these guys had been around thirty years ago, they probably would have been chewed up and spit back out. You have to wonder where some of these newer fellas even get their juice from. I think Roth exploited the internet and his genre knowledge to win people over (riding Quentin Tarantino's coattails also proved beneficial, I'm sure), while Zombie obviously already had a tailor-made army of fans left over from his music career ready to embrace his filmmaking career regardless of whatever he put out. I think both still have a lot to learn, so hopefully they'll be able to grow as filmmakers instead of falling into traps.

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I was startled that Zombie chose Halloween as a project after the success of The Devil's Rejects. He had to have done that strictly for the money, especially in light of the fact he'd publicly ridiculed remakes and those who made them. His "reimaging" excuse was simply horse *beep* and now I see people throwing that word around all the time, which gets on my last nerve. I have less faith in Roth, though. He's a mixture of ass kissing (to get projects off the ground) and half-assed (when it comes to the actual films). Hostel II was nothing more than a sex switch on the original and the exact type of cynical, soulless $$$ grubbing venture that I consider creative bankruptcy. I was really happy to see that film flop. The fact Zombie's Halloween did well (which I am still convinced boils down to brand name recognition alone) makes me hope he's able to parlay that success into something worthwhile. I'm still waiting on it.

Mountaintop Motel Massacre (1983)

...aka: Mountain Top Motel

Directed by:

Jim McCullough, Jr.

I'm sure a lot of 80s horror freaks have seen this one based on the memorable tag line alone - "Please do not disturb Evelyn...she already is!" Anna Chappell stars as the elderly Evelyn, who's let out of a mental hospital and starts running the Mountaintop Motel, a scuzzy string of run-down shacks out in the sticks that would have me sleeping in the nearest ditch. She snaps again and, on a dark and stormy night, beings murdering people stranded at her hotel. Guests include a honeymooning couple, two reverends, a record executive and a pair of Barbara Mandrell clones who don't wear bras (as evidenced by a scene where both are caught out in the rain wearing flimsy white tops). Funny sounding cosmic music plays whenever Evelyn is up to something devious. She lurks around in underground catacombs spying on victims with her bugged-out eyes, hears her dead daughter's voice, sneaks snakes, roaches and rats into rooms and hacks people up with a sickle.

This isn't even in the same ballpark as the major movie it draws inspiration from - PSYCHO - but who's really expecting it to be? If you're more reasonable and have no expectations going in, it really isn't all that terrible. Shot on a very low budget in Louisiana, this has an effective desolate backwoods atmosphere and the sets are fairly good. There are a few good laughs (intended and otherwise), and some blood, and while the cast isn't exactly what I'd call professional, they are at least spirited about their respective roles. Larry Buchanan fans, if such a thing actually exists, will recognize Bill Thurman as an alcoholic reverend. Also in the cast are Virginia Loridans (also in the obscure VIDEO MURDERS), stunt man Gregg Brazzel, Amy Hill and James Bradford as the sheriff.

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Not released until 1986.

★★