Oni (1972)

... aka: 鬼
... aka: Demon, The

Directed by:
Kihachiro Kawamoto

Director / writer Kawamoto began his career as an assistant production designer at Toho before branching off on his own. Always with an interest in both puppets and stop motion animation, he co-founded his own commercial animation studio in 1958 and studied under both Tadahito Mochinaga in Japan and Jiří Trnka in Czechoslovakia. By the late 60s he was making his very own animated shorts, which melded model, cut-out and stop motion animation and usually involved puppets in some capacity. The Demon was the third of around a dozen shorts Kawamoto made before his death in 2010. He also made three feature films and was president of the Japan Animation Association for over two decades, starting in 1989. This seven-and-a-half minute short was based on one of the folk tales from Konjaku-monogatari ("Anthology of Tales from the Past"); a collection of 1000+ very short stories seldom running longer than 3 pages apiece that dates back to 12th-century medieval Japan. The authors of these stories, and origin of the 28 volume collection, are still unknown but these tales are still read, and sometimes even adapted for film, TV and theater, to this very day.

Living a miserable and impoverished life, two young hunters who live at home with their sickly old mother, venture out into the woods with their bows and arrows to hunt a deer. On the way to a good location the younger brother hears noises and sees a pair of gleaming red eyes off in the brush that the older sibling writes off as, respectively, wind and fireflies. When the younger brother positions himself in a tree, a pale arm reaches down and grabs him by the hair. The elder then shoots the demon's arm off with his bow. The two take the severed arm back home where they make a startling discovery. Seeing how the story itself is very predictable, one's enjoyment of this will depend almost entirely on how much they take to the visual presentation and animation style.

This has been released on DVD several times, including as part of the 2007 Geneon release "The Collected Works of Kihachiro Kawamoto" and as part of the 2008 Kimstim release "The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto." While both sets contain optional English subs for all of the shorts, the Geneon release is the more complete of the two and has three additional shorts not found on the Kimstim one.

★★1/2

Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)

... aka: Reise nach Transilvanien (Trip to Transylvania)
... aka: Transilvânia - Hotel do Outro Lado do Mundo (Transylvania - Hotel Across the World)
... aka: Una notte in Transilvania (One Night in Transylvania)
... aka: Ursäkta var är Dracula (Sorry, Where Is Dracula?)

Directed by:
Rudy De Luca

After receiving a videotape titled "Frankenstein Lives" that purports to be an actual monster attack, tabloid newspaper editor Mac Turner (Norman Fell) purchases two airplane tickets to Transylvania for his brown-nosing, awkward son Gil (Ed Begley Jr.) and intelligent but cocky reporter Jack Harrison (Jeff Goldblum). The objective? Come back with a headline-grabbing story about a monster terrorizing the area. Upon arrival, Jack makes it clear that he doesn't take the assignment seriously and makes a mad dash for American tourist / single mother Elizabeth Ellison (Teresa Ganzel) instead while Gil makes a laughing stock of both of them when he point blank inquires about Frankenstein. They are ushered off to a castle hotel owned by shady Transylvanian Mayor Lepescu (Jeffrey Jones), who uses a mini guillotine to cut eggs, and populated by an oddball staff that includes thoroughly obnoxious doorman Fejos (Michael Richards), faux hunchback butler Radu (John Byner) and his klutzy cook wife Lupi (Carol Kane), who have a bizarre love/hate thing going on.

While Jack hassles Elizabeth on the phone to try to get a date, Gil gets to work on the actual assignment. That leads him to the shooting location of the video as well as an old gypsy (Inge Appelt) who points them in the direction of a supposed werewolf that turns out to just be a philandering man. After that dead end, the monster story starts coming to them all by itself, starting with sexy female vampire Odette (Geena Davis), who pays nighttime visits to Gil in his room through a hidden passageway. Secretive behavior from a local police inspector (Bozidar Smiljanic), the mayor and the heavily-guarded asylum of Dr. Vittorio Malavaqua (Joseph Bologna) arouse suspicions. Jack and Gil eventually realize there's a cover-up of sorts going on.

The director / writer, who also has a cameo as suspected werewolf Lawrence Malbot, was a co-founder of The Comedy Store and frequent collaborator of Mel Brooks' so it's quite surprising how spectacularly unfunny most of this mess is. It seems to want to do for the entire Universal monster collective what Brooks' Young Frankenstein (1974) did for Whale's classics but doesn't work at all due to terrible jokes, awful dialogue (much of which was clearly improvised or sometimes looped in later... and horribly so!), grating overacting from nearly the entire cast and a monotonous noisy / obnoxious tone from start to finish. And yet it's not for lack of trying. They manage to make room for a mummy, a vampire, a wolf man, a Frankenstein monster, a hunchback, a mad doctor with Jekyll & Hyde tendencies and more, but seldom come up with any clever gags to involve these "creatures" in. As an added insult, the entire film is flat and ugly to look at.

The cast is a huge selling point - perhaps an even bigger selling point now than when this was first released - but even this front loaded comic ensemble can't save writing this bad. While Begley Jr. at least adequately feigns being in the spirit of things, Goldblum seems utterly disinterested in the material. Richards, already fine-tuning his spastic form of ungainly slapstick this far back in his career, is nothing short of annoying, and I found Kane (who I usually like) every bit as irritating. There are awful attempts at Eastern European accents, with Jones and Bologna being the worst offenders there. While this may even be intentionally bad, it's still not funny in the least. Ganzel is at least cute and Davis looks great in her vampire costume but neither are given enough to do. And poor Donald Gibb aka Ogre from the Revenge of the Nerds films, ends up with some of the worst one-liners ("I'll tear every bit of hair out of your ass!"). I did at least enjoy Fell's cameo in the opening scene.

This 3-million-budgeted, PG-rated New World Pictures release was financed by Dow Chemical Corporation (!!) solely so they they could unfreeze some locked assets they had in Yugoslavia. The investment returned just over 7 million in a domestic release and this didn't even crack the Top 100 for its year. Critics also hated it. Over thirty years later, all it really has left are nostalgic "fans" who saw it on TV when they were younger. And it's probably true that this may play better for children than adults; at least adults who don't enjoy things like Paul Bart: Mall Cop and Dumb and Dumberer.

The title is a play on the famous Glenn Miller song "Pennsylvania 6-5000" which had already been used for a 1963 animated short featuring Bugs Bunny in a vampire count's castle. That short is just six and a half minutes long and is funnier and more clever than this.

★1/2

New York Centerfold Massacre (1985)

... aka: Starlet Blue Massacre, The

Directed by:
Louis Ferriol

The 80s slasher movie boom gave us such household names as Jason, Freddy, Chucky, Michael Myers and Pinhead... but who cares about those losers? What about Alma Vinelli? On the outside, a devoutly-religious old crone who likes to sit around all day reading bible passages, singing "Yes, Jesus loves me. The bible tells me so" over and over again and watching Kenneth Copeland and Jimmy Swaggart's televangelist shows on TV, Alma (Jane De Leeuw) proves herself a formidable opponent to her more-famous brothers-in-crime in this camcorder-shot Vidimax mail order video from hell.

Alma's frizzy-headed 20-year-old niece Carla (Paula Weckesser) likes to wear (gasp!) short-shorts out in public. If that isn't bad enough, she's hanging out with a girl who makes her money posing in lingerie for a sleazy Soho photographer, with only a surgical scar keeping her from showing her full glory. Regardless, the friend suggests to Carla that she go to the same photographer and become a nude centerfold model ("You mean nude, as in naked?") so she can afford her own place and get away from her religious nutso aunt. Alma knows her niece is being led astray, but what's a 70-year-old God-fearin' Christian woman to do? Well if you're Alma, you throw a pillowcase over your head, put on your finest Christmas sweater and start hacking up nude models. Hey, it might discourage your loved ones from flashing their goodies for quick cash if other models who do the same thing get chopped to pieces, right? I mean, if both the photographer you were going to model for and all his models died before you even got there, you might not even show up, right? Well, if you're Carla you won't let the death of the person who died before you even had a chance to set up an appointment keep you from showing up anyway, ready to drop your drawers.

Detective Lawrence Sorenson (Lawrence Lubiner) and his Jheri curl-sporting sidekick Williams (Jamel Elam) are on the case. At first they think the killer might be "greaseball" mafioso Tony Martino (Dick Biel - SPLATTER UNIVERSITY), since he previously was involved in child porn and likes to stage bogus auditions so he can drug and rape the starlets who show up. But nah, he's nothing more than your garden variety serial rapist and pedophile, not the actual killer. Try again. Some woman named Marnie (Norma Sparno), who I think is related to one of the victims or is someone's roommate or something, gets fed up waiting for the police to apprehend the killer, so she decides to hire a psychic named Flavian to help her.

Meanwhile, Darlene (Elizabeth Gardner) and Cassie (Francine Robin Cuff), who suggests her friend wear clean panties to their centerfold audition, show up to the (already-dead) photographer's loft studio for an "interview." Cassie can't find a bathroom, so she decides to look for a dark corner where she can relieve herself. While her friend is off pissing on the floor somewhere, Darlene ends up encountering the psycho, who promptly clubs her over the head with a tripod and then sticks a hair dryer in her mouth. I'm not sure what happened to Cassie. She kind of just doesn't come back. During a collage of clips featuring Tammy Faye Bakker (ack!) singing, another model (Leslie Duncan) lying around in her panties is attacked. The killer grabs a bottle with a plain white label with the word "acid" written on it with a ballpoint pen and pours it down her throat.

Lordy. I don't even know where to begin with this one. For starters, it's definitely in the Top 5 of the worst slasher movies I've seen, but since it's about as obscure as they come you won't be likely to stumble across this one unless you're actively looking for it. To be fair, what I saw was a 39-minute composite of re-edited surviving footage made from ancient video sources. According to the director, part of the footage was accidentally erased during production and then the warehouse the original masters were stored in burned to the ground. What we're left with is a copy-of-a-copy and it's awful on every conceivable level.

Even though the people who reassembled what is being presented here didn't have much to work with, this is incredibly hard to follow. Often they'll show a brief flash of something that has absolutely nothing to do with what's going on, leaving you sitting there scratching your head and thinking, "WTF was that?" To make matters worse, there are about a half dozen actresses in this with the same bad 80s hairstyle and same exact hair color and I had a hard time telling them all apart. Because the remaining footage lacked nudity, newer shots of several girls stripping down to their thongs, which are entirely unrelated to the rest of the story, have been spliced in here and there. Seeing how one of the girls is wearing a Hollister t-shirt, this stuff had to have been filmed sometime in the new millennium (Hollister didn't even exist until 2000).

This was first advertised in horror mags as The Starlet Blue Massacre before the title change. The opening credits boast about "guest stars centerfolds" Cheryl Lee and Kandi Barbour. I had to look them up to see who they were. Lee later moved on playing "The Leggy Blonde" in the Macauley Culkin vehicle Getting Even with Dead (1994), while Barbour was a porno star.

NO STARS!