Folies Meurtrières (1984)

... aka: Deadly Insanity
... aka: Deadly Madness
... aka: Murderer's Follies
... aka: Murderous Follies

Directed by:
Antoine Pellissier

As the sun sets over the horizon, a young woman in a bikini sunbathes on some rocks, walks around and goes swimming... but someone is watching her. The hooded killer then follows her home and stalks her as she does dishes, walks around some more and then sits down to smoke. The nut steals a knife from her kitchen drawer, chases her around and stabs through a door. Closet doors start bleeding and she finds a chained-up, bloody zombie man tucked inside who tries to strangle her. Jumping out a window, she hurts her leg and stumbles around screaming until the killer finally sinks a pick axe into her skull. That's followed by 17 shots (!) of blood squirting out of the wound filmed from different angles. This ten minute long opener is nearly dialogue free and highly reminiscent of another inept no budget early 80s French slasher flick called MAD MUTILATOR / Ogroff the Axe Monster (1983). Like Mutilator, this was shot on Super 8 with no plot and no sound (music and a few lines were added later) and is little more than an excuse to show off amateur gore effects. While Mutilator has gone on to a very minor following (back in 2009 when I first reviewed it there were barely any reviews online... now there are a ton!), Follies remains in the shadows. Does it have the same potential for a fan following? Perhaps. It's certainly on the same plane of existence as Ogroff.

Our next long vignette, which also lasts about 10 minutes, involves a woman out driving who is stalked by the killer riding a motorcycle. She thinks she loses him after driving into a mine / rock quarry but he finds her. Instead of continuing to drive, for some dumb reason she exits her car and starts running and running and running. An injured man lying on the ground randomly jumps out at her then dies (!?) The woman attempts to hide behind a concrete beam but the killer grabs her and beats her head against it until she's unconscious. As he's trying to start a chainsaw, she wakes up and tries to run off but he hits her with a rock and knocks her back down. He then gets the chainsaw started and disembowels her with it. There are countless shots of the saw chewing up her stomach and blood flying around everywhere.

It's at this point that I'm starting to think this may be some kind of parody or satire of gratuitous slasher / gore flicks. The killer turns the corner and there's conveniently a chainsaw just sitting right there, doors are always locked, there's comically overdone POV shots and gore coverage and an echo-voiced sinister narrator gives us the date for each event ("Friday, February 14th!") as if that matters. One could perhaps go a step further and say this is even an attempt at commentary on such films seeing how this takes the famous between-the-legs The Graduate seduction shot and repeats it for the killer as if sexualizing or fetishizing the violence. It isn't until they trot out the cat-jumping-into-frame-from-out-of-nowhere jump scare and the random dying man making a third appearance (which will be followed by a fourth, fifth and sixth appearance) that I realized that, yes, this is indeed poking fun at these films. Mind you that doesn't mean this is necessarily a good or clever satire. It just appears to be what they were aiming for.

The murder spree continues: After discovering bloody animal parts in her refrigerator, a woman is chopped up with a tin foil axe (shades of Nick Millard!). Girl #4 is out doing some gardening and hedge trimming when she gets her head crushed in a vice. A fifth woman out driving in the middle of the night pulls over to read a magazine (?) and gets her entire car painted in blood as dying random man randomly appears on her roof. The killer then magically appears in her back seat and stabs her to death. Things lead up to a twist ending, where the killer is revealed and motives explained, which is followed by a pretty bold-faced rip-off of the ending of William Lustig's MANIAC (1980)... only minus the make-up magic of Tom Savini.

Amateur 80s movies that were shot on video or a lower grade film stock and contain endless walking / stalking / padding, whirring synth beats and ineptitude on full display in nearly every frame seem to have a mesmeric power over some viewers. And by some viewers I actually mean very few viewers who just happen to be extremely vocal and dedicated to singing the praises of ultra low budget "alternative anti-entertainment" such as this. Some seem to genuinely like these films for sincere, personal reasons. After all, they do possess a unique vibe from a unique era with a unique aesthetic and I completely get that. I like the look and feel of some of these myself. I also get how inept / weird / cheap regional films, even the really bad ones, often have their own distinct charms. This aspect also appeals to me.

On the other hand are those who seem disingenuous and self-serving in their admiration; using unarguably bad films as a means to broadcast to the world at large how unique they fancy themselves and their tastes to be. These folks appear to hunt down obscure / bad films just so they can twist themselves into a pretzel coming up with laughably pretentious, pseudo-intellectual bullshit reasons said films aren't actually incompetent crap but instead misunderstood masterpieces that no one else gets. These people are so fucking annoying, never shut up and have a tendency to drown out those with a sincere appreciation for this stuff who, like any sane human being, recognize they like these films in big part because, obviously, they're not good. Sure, everyone has different taste, but if your taste leans toward incompetently-made crap, just own it. Along those same lines, this new trend of trying to prop up virtually every bad 80s horror flick needs to end already. It's like some semi-delusional revisionist-history nostalgia plague where every piece of crap from this era is suddenly hailed as some kind of cult film.

Despite what you may read elsewhere, Follies is certainly inept crap from a technical viewpoint. There's next to no plot, awful photography and editing, ghastly overexposure that frequently drowns out the images, endless scenes of people walking around, almost no dialogue, loads of cheap gore / bright red blood and a repetition that grows tiresome well before the ending. This presents the same exact scenario, using the same exact gags (only the murder weapon is switched), five times, which takes up 40 minutes of this 48 minute movie. While that's going to bore the hell out of most viewers, those who have an affinity for slow, droning films may find this more palatable. And this isn't entirely without entertainment value / occasional moments of amusement. Hell, some of the poor photography and lighting, which plays hell on most of the outdoor footage, works almost in spite of itself for the indoor scenes, especially for shadow-casting purposes. This is still crap, though.

The director, who now primarily works as a medical doctor (!), also made Les proies du mal / "The Prey of Evil" (1982) and L'elue des enfers / "The Chosen One from Hell" (1985), both of which are seemingly impossible to find, and Maleficia (1998). He's also the subject of Pauline Pallier's 2009 documentary Dr. Gore.

★1/2

Dorimu hanta Remu (1985)

... aka:ドリームハンター麗夢
... aka: Beautiful Dream Appears
... aka: Dorīmu Hantā Remu
... aka: Dorīmu Hantā Remu: Sanmu! Yomigaeru Shinigami Hakase
... aka: Dream Hunter Rem
... aka: Dream Hunter Rem: Rem Appears
... aka: Dream Hunter Rem: Special Version
... aka: Dream Hunter Rem: Violent Dream! Dr. Death Resurrected

Directed by:
Seiji Okuda

Rem Ayanokōji is a green-haired, bubbly teenage detective with her own office in a shady part of Tokyo who specializes in solving supernatural mysteries. She doesn't advertise her services, deals with clientele on a strictly word-of-mouth basis and has two trusty assistants in Alpha and Beta: a cat and a dog with supernatural powers of their own and the ability to transform into larger versions of themselves. In our first story, "Rem Appears," the nervous assistant of a man shows up at her office with a new job that involves another teenage girl named Miyuki who has not been acting herself recently. Possession is suspected. Rem loads her Colt .44 Magnum with silver bullets engraved with crosses on the tips, hops in her convertible (which has a hidden missile launcher tucked away in the back!) with her assistants and she's off to a gloomy old mansion out in the middle of nowhere. She meets the girls' parents, Goutokuhi and Kumiko, who inform her that even the best university doctors have been unable to help their ailing daughter. In fact, one of the top doctors has already been driven crazy trying. Fearing she'll die, they contacted Rem out of desperation. Rem scans the daughter's body with her special ghost goggles and realizes she's covered with invisible little ghosts and monsters.

As the title implies, Rem's special gift is the ability to enter others' dreams to find out what's really harming them. In Miyuki's case it's a large, tentacled blue demon who's sucking away Miyuki's lifeforce by keeping her from falling asleep. Because this is a dream, the best the demons can really do is create illusions; something Rem is well aware of. It impales her with shards of wood, levitates her, makes her face melt off, sends a legion of mini-demons her way and then transforms into a demon sword fighter. Rem does some transforming of her own: into a sword-wielding fighter in a bikini and knee-high boots. She's the original Dream Warrior! After the demon threatens to just kill Miyuki in the dream, Rem is able to coerce it out of the dream into the real world, where it materializes as a giant, Godzilla-like monster, to do battle. The loser ends up dead for "real."

After a brief interlude called "Rem's Study" where our heroine briefly explains dreams to us, our next tale - the obviously NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET-inspired "Violent Dream! Dr. Death Resurrected" begins. A series of disappearances and decapitation murders are plaguing Tokyo and detectives are on the case. The culprit is Doctor Shimura, a gray-haired psycho who dresses in a cape and top hat, uses a grim reaper-like scythe and not only kills but also "collects" young girls, whom he keeps in liquid-filled tubes back at his home. Once the police catch up to him after yet another killing, they discover that he's not quite human either. He survives multiple bullet wounds and even a gunshot directly to the head. Once cornered in his home, he ingests some kind of potion that makes him burn down to a skeleton and evaporate. Is his reign of terror finally over? Nope!

A series of identical killings soon follow after the doctor's presumed death, except this time the victims have all been killed in their sleep and the bodies are all found in their bedrooms. And those who have survived the dream attacks have woken up with real wounds. Detective Junichirō Sakaki, whose own daughter Yukari has also been attacked but survived (at least this time), has no other choice than to consult Rem. Rem immediately goes to Det. Sakaki's home, where she finds bald monk named Enkou praying over Yukari's body. Though Enkou can only do so much, his prayers actually do end up helping our heroine when she's in the middle of doing battle with the bad guy.

After Rem enters Yukari's dream, she has an encounter with Dr. Shimura, who now has a half-skeletal face. He impersonates Yukari's motorcycle-riding boyfriend Naoto, who had been killed when a semi truck hit his bike, to try to trick them and eventually gets Rem, Alpha and Beta strapped underneath a razor-sharp pendulum. Shimura also has a special device that can change a dreamers sleep from REM (deep sleeping when most pleasant dreams occur) to non-REM sleep (a shallow sleep when most nightmares occur).

Seeing how this was not originally intended as a feature (see below as to why) it's unavoidably episodic and slightly disjointed by default. It's also a little too one-note with the characters. Our heroine is a complete mystery that we don't really learn much about and comes off as excessively perky at times, though it's this exact dichotomy between cutesy and grisly that provides a unique kind of entertainment you usually only get from anime. This will perhaps be of special interest to Elm Street series fans as you get to see a similar concept done in a format where there are no technological or budgetary restrictions on the crazy avenues the dreams can go down.

The original video release from Orange Video House in June 1985 ran just 21 minutes, included just the first tale and contained several scenes of hentai (anime porn), including Miyuki masturbating when the sheets are pulled back, getting tentacle raped and being tortured nude, plus Rem herself getting raped by the demon's mutant green tentacle wiener and then shooting a laser out of her vagina. Girl power! Close-up shots of genitalia and penetration were all, of course, scrambled. All of these shots were either replaced with clothed shots or removed altogether for the later "special version" released in November 1985; the same month the first Elm Street sequel FREDDY'S REVENGE hit U.S. theaters. This second release is the one that includes the mad doctor tale and it runs about 46 minutes. I have included shots from the uncut version below for the curious. Personally, I could give or take these bits. They add a little shock value perhaps but I also didn't miss them at all while viewing the cut version.

These two tapes proved to be very popular in Japan, so two immediate sequels (released in 1986 and 1987) followed plus a spin-off series called New Dream Hunter Rem that lasted 2 chapters (released in 1990 and 1992). There were also releases of DHR soundtracks, CD "voice movie" versions, novels and comics. Two DVD box sets of the series were released by Only Hearts in Japan in 2006 and 2007.

★★1/2