Crowley (1987)

Directed by:
Ricardo Islas

How does a 1980s camcorder-shot vampire movie made by a 16-year-old from Uruguay sound? Well, whatever you're thinking, this is certainly bad but it's not nearly as bad as it could have been under the circumstances. In a small, coastal colonial town, a clawed, drooling, pasty-faced vampire rises from the ground near an old cemetery. He immediately gets to work dispatching a necking couple by tossing the guy over a wall and punching the girl in the face, sending a hilarious stuffed dummy flying across a field. He then punches her in the face some more until he crushes her skull and sucks out all her blood. The bodies are found and then taken to a coroner's office, where the doctor does a thorough examination, not only discovering the girl has been completely drained dry but also that there are puncture wounds and traces of human saliva on her neck. He takes his findings to his police inspector friend (Mario Fernández), who's already been to the crime scene and discovered a freshly-dug grave near where the bodies were found as well as muddy footprints leading from it up to the crime scene. After another girl is attacked and killed in the same manner, the two men ponder whether the killer is a human psycho who only fancies himself a vampire or the real thing. Even more bloodless corpses turning up all over town and a funeral home reporting a coffin being stolen fail to convince them one way or another.

Doing a much better job investigating the murders than all of the adults is a shy, geeky college student named Andres Gutierrez (Juan C. Lazzarini). Andres studies up on vampires and starts researching local history at both the library and a church where he learns that back in the late 17th Century a strange European man by the name of Adrian Crowley arrived in the area when it was still a tiny Portuguese colony. There, he took a maiden named Maria as his lover and, being a vampire, fed off the locals until he was caught by townspeople and hung. Before dying, he vowed to return 300 years later not only to get his revenge but also be reunited with his lost love, who has been reincarnated in the present day as a teen named, you guessed it, Maria (Fanny Bertinat). All it takes is one brief run-in with the vampire in an abandoned house to make Andres realize that the local legend is indeed true, though he doesn't have an easy time convincing everyone else of that.

It isn't until Crowley (who's played by director Islas) kills and drains another young girl and slaughters four punks in a park (including stabbing a guy on the top of his head with a switchblade and crushing a head in his bare hands) that the cops start taking Andres seriously. The Inspector, his assistant Martinez and another officer then go to check out the vampire's tomb. They end up encountering the vamp and only the Inspector gets out of there alive, though one of his officers does at least manage to shoot the vampire's eyeball out before being disemboweled. Crowley then heads out after Maria. After stabbing her best friend Marta (Sandra Casagna) through the throat with a kitchen knife and drowning her boyfriend Jorge (Daniel Lacoste) in a toilet (though he manages to survive the attack), Crowley finally gets his claws on her and whisks her off to some tunnels located underneath the school's campus. Can Andres and Jorge get to her in time?

Pretty much all of the technical aspects of this one are as bad as they get, from the horribly overdone lighting to the blurry and frequently out of focus videography to the poor continuity all the way up to the amateurish acting, cheap gore fx, ragged editing and opening credits drawn with markers set to stolen music from The Amityville Horror. However, this demonstrates a general competence when it comes to basic storytelling and a surprising maturity considering the director's age. The plot is easy to follow, the characters are adequately established and this never really crosses the line into being laughably incompetent regardless of how cheap it is. It's merely an ordinary, unoriginal story done about as well as it could have been done given the nonexistent budget, the shooting medium and the inexperienced cast and crew. Though far from good, it's still ambitious and oddly impressive given the director's age. There's a tendency for young filmmakers stuck working with little money to fall back on self-mocking dumb laughs as some built-in apology for making you sit through their dumb / cheap film. Islas, on the other hand, takes his film completely seriously and is at least sincerely trying to make something decent.

This is quite possibly the very first feature-length horror film ever made in Uruguay. If it's not, it's the first (and one of the only) to show up on an IMDb title search. Islas' crop of early work (which were all screened on, and partially financed by, Channel 3 TV, Colonia del Sacramento) includes the short Possession (1986) and the features Feather Pillow (1989) and Crowley's Ashes (1990); a follow-up to this one. He continued to make films in his home country until a trip to Chicago in the mid 90s, where a movie of his was being screened at a film festival, found him falling in love with the city and relocating there permanently. Since then he's made a good number of low budget horror films, including Headcrusher (1999), Night Fangs (2005), To Kill a Killer (2007) and Frankenstein: Day of the Beast (2011).

★1/2

Leng yan sha ji (1982)

... aka: Breakout from Oppression
... aka: Exposed to Danger
... aka: Exterminator final (Final Exterminator)
... aka: Ni tian xing dao zhi sha ji
... aka: Out of Danger
... aka: Sha chu chong wei
... aka: Sha ji Taiwan

Directed by:
"Karen" (Chia-Yun) Yang

Fresh from an eight-year prison stint after falsely being convicted of the the murder of her married lover, Fonda Chiu ("Fonda Lynn" / Siu-Fan Luk) gets a new job as assistant editor of a newspaper, moves into a nice house in the country and tries to have a fresh start, vowing to keep her criminal background a secret. Everything's looking up for her socially, professionally and romantically, as she's making new friends, doing well at her job and begins dating her nice and understanding boss Simon Chang (Alan Tam). Unfortunately, Fonda has also attracted the attention of a vengeful psycho who goes out of their way to make her life a living hell. Said nut job is a jealous 17-year-old psycho-bitch named Sheena ("Lona" / Fu-Mei Chang), who works for the same newspaper as a secretary, victimizes her wheelchair-bound granny ("Carol Chang" / Ying Ying) and tortures a male prisoner (the missing newspaper president) in the cellar of her home! Sheena also twists the head off her doll, kills animals (including chopping off chicken heads and hanging Fonda's pet monkey), tries to seduce Fonda's new man, beats someone to death with a flashlight, beats another guy over the head with a wrench, stabs a guy to death with a butcher knife and feeds a child a spring roll laced with broken glass! To make matters worse she's clever enough to implicate Fonda for her crimes, turning friends and coworkers against her.

The version I saw was the one released on one of those 50 movie packs by Mill Creek Entertainment. The dubbing is hilariously awful and the picture quality is equally bad, as they used a flat-looking, extremely washed-out video print. However, the story itself is entertaining enough to make this worth watching regardless. It's also very fast-paced and seldom drags. The weaving of the current story line with flashbacks is confusing at first, but the film adequately ties up all the loose ends eventually and is done with some competence. In other words, everything starts to makes sense if you hang in there long enough. The film also boasts quite a few entertainingly weird moments, like when a shrieking monkey appears out of nowhere and when Fonda and a photographer ("Jacky Lim" / Tsai-Pei Lin) visit a crime scene and are suddenly attacked by some random madwoman with a butcher knife! There are also some prison flashbacks of our heroine getting roughed up by a cell block bully who slips a razor blade into her soap, a cat fight and the girls all getting sprayed down with a water hose by guards. It's not boring.

Before I discovered the true identity of this movie, which is listed most places under the title Breakout from Oppression and with an erroneous 1978 copyright date, I made the following observations: "Perhaps the most startling thing about this film is that if it were indeed made in 1978 (as is listed on most online sources) then a very famous slasher movie completely ripped off the ending and hasn't been called on it. Ever heard of Friday the 13th? Here we get the female lead vs. the female psycho on a beach. There's an overturned canoe nearby. They fight with oars. The psycho gets on top of our heroine and starts beating her head into the ground, and finally the leading lady grabs a machete off the ground, runs up to the psycho and chops her head off. The shots, editing and even use of slow-motion are completely identical and Fonda is even seen floating in a canoe the next morning when the police arrive! If I had to venture a guess, I'd say the year for this film is incorrectly listed here. I even think I heard snippets of Pino Donaggio's Dressed to Kill (1980) score being used, so this film was likely made sometime in the early 80s as opposed to 1978."

As it turns out, this was indeed made sometime after Friday; between 1982 and 1984 (sources vary depending on where you look) and was shot under the title Leng yan sha ji. The VHS release by Tai Seng Video Marketing and the VCD from Ocean Shores have the English-language title as Exposed to Danger. IMDb (which uses the 1982 year of release) actually has this listed twice in their database; once under the Breakout title and another time as Out of Danger. Though I have no clue where the 1978 date came from, the new Breakout title was given to the film after it was acquired by Godfrey Ho, Joseph Lai and their IFD Films & Arts, who broke tradition and did not add ninja scenes to it. It didn't even matter that the same title had already been used for the 1973 Hong Kong action film Sha chu chong wei, which has caused a lot of confusion over the years. The Anglicized credits are mostly fakes, including those given for the director and lead actress, who also teamed up for the rape-revenge thriller Deadly Darling (1981); another IFD release. On the print I watched, the copyright date is 1985, Lai is the credited producer and Ho is credited as both the writer (as "Benny Ho") and production designer (!?)

This wasn't well-distributed here in America until 2009 when it became a staple in those public domain DVD multi-packs. There was also a VHS release in France trying to market it as an action film. In 2013, a company called Heaven Fire put out a DVD that claims to be digitally restored.

★★1/2