More movies to groove upon..

Sat May 10, 2008
[REC] (2007) *** - Jaume Balaguero who directed the fantastic film The Nameless enters the now very popular "hand held camera" horror sub genre that was made popular with The Blair Witch Project and more recently Cloverfield. Except he has made a film that easily trumps both of those turkeys in sheer scariness and effectiveness. The story follows a young TV show host and her cameraman as they do a reality show on a fire-station in Spain. They go with the fireman out on a call to an apartment building where there were noises and yelling from an old ladies apartment. ***SPOILERS AHEAD*** As the firemen and a couple of policemen enter the apartment they find an old lady covered in blood who promptly attacks the cop and bites his neck. They manage to get the cop out of there and back down to the lobby where the inhabitants of the building have all been told to gather by the police previously only to find that the doors have been locked from the outside. The authorities on the outside are telling them that they have to stay in there until help arrives. The reporter and her camera man race to an upstairs window to find that the building is now being encased in plastic. They are being quarantined as there is something loose in the building causing people to get sick go nuts... What makes this work is the sheer adrenaline it achieves. Once it takes off there is not a moment to catch your breath. This is a short movie, barely 75 minutes and it never lets up. Sure it is derivative of other films from 28 Days Later to Romero's The Crazies, but it moves with such force that you really don't have time to feel it. The images on display are actually scary for one too. The last ten minutes of this movie are incredibly frightening with a figure we couldn't figure out if it was CGI or just a really fucked up actor, but either way it was scary as hell. This suffers from the same problem many of this "Hand held" movies do, which is that it is unrealistic for the characters to continue filming once the main horrors get so intense. Survival instinct would dictate to drop the fucking camera because your life depends on it. This movie makes some effort to address that, but at times it still is problematic. It also has the lead actress saying fuck too much which makes you wonder if they let her ad lib a certain amount of dialogue. But small complaints aside this is powerful and scary stuff and highly recommended. As per usual this Spanish language movie is being remade by Hollywood under the title Quarantine and I guarantee they will not be able to top the climax. First time seeing this.

Walking Tall Part 2 (1975) **1/2 - This sequel is kind of like the first film but cleaned up. It takes up right where the first movie left off with Bufford Pusser recuperating in a secret hospital from his gunshot wounds from the first film. Pusser is played this time by Bo Svenson and it takes some getting used to , to see someone else playing the roll besides Joe Don Baker. Svenson takes a very different approach to the Character playing him as a gentle giant. A sensitive man carrying a big stick. It is a solid performance, just a very different one from the first film. Once Pusser is out of the hospital he goes right back to work as the sheriff and the old enemies put a bounty on his head. First a race car driver tries to run him off the road after messing with his tires. Then several other guys try to blow up his car, and then they tamper with his brakes and fuck up his steering column which end up getting his Black Deputy killed. Here in lies the problem with this movie; the first film was a fireball of viciousness that kept upping the stakes of the movie went along. Here that violence is replaced with car chases and small time situations in which our hero outsmarts the bad guys. Now according to Svenson in an interview this is more true to Pusser's life, and the opening credit crawl shows a police report and claims this is the true story with only a few names changed. But compared to the first film it leaves a little to be desired. This is well acted and certainly has a lot of natural Tennessee flavor, but it lacks the raw edge that made the first film great. Angel Tomkins is along for the ride as a con woman who tries to woo Pusser into a situation where he will be killed and shows her amazing melons along the way as well as her world class gams, so thats a plus, and Brooke Mills as bad guy girl Ruby Ann almost steals the show towards the end too. First time seeing this.

Sunday May 11, 2008
I Know Who Killed Me (2007) ** - Average thriller enlivened by some gory set pieces and a surprisingly okay performance by Linsay Lohan in the lead role. A big to do was made about her taking on this dark "torture porn" movie where she plays a stripper but she never really drops her clothes. But boy does she look the part of a haggered hard living girl of the streets. Even when she is playing the good girl next door in the first part of the movie she still looks like a few miles of rough road. This girl is like a poster for what hard living will do to you. She's what like 21 or 22 and looks like she's my age! The plot is about a high school senior who is abducted by a serial killer and tortured. He saws off her fingers and more. Then she is mysteriously found on the side of the road, except when she comes too she claims she is not the same girl, but a hard bitten stripper. The movie takes some odd turns that requires, of all things, Art Bell to come on and give a speech to explain things to make it make sense. It almost pulls it off except it really confuses things in the last reel with the reveal of the killer and his motives and how they find him. The director made the low budget film The Lost which I complained was too over directed and flashy for its own good. This is more of the same in that department. An okay time waster. First time seeing this.

Three Trials (2006) ** - Extremely well shot and pretty to look at but emotionally empty S+M fantasy that seems to be in love with the imagery, but also the degradation on display as well. The plot follows a young nun who has narcalepsy who witnesses a sexual transgression between the grotesquely obese Father superior and the head nun. For her sin of seeing this she is sent on a mysterious quest of three trials. She is whisked away in a car while blind folded, taken to an abandoned factory (that on screen we are told is another church) stripped down (oddly enough she is wearing a fishnet body stocking with the crotch and boobs cut out under her gown!) put on a leash and forced to crawl through the halls while lightly whipped. She is put into a confessional on her hands and knees and while confessing fucked from one of her captors, but her narcalypsy forces her to pass out... The movie travels through surreal vignette after vignette with small tissue connecting them, all of it being a way to get the very attractive leading lady into some sort of fetishistic situation. Most of them S+M based. There's an obligatory lesbian/mutual masturbation scene and a scene where she is sewn into fox pelts and then fucks a were-monster for all the furries freaks out there. The monster turns into a man and becomes her slave master forcing her into degrading situation after another, each on worse and worse with her wanting him more and more. I began to wonder if this is supposed to be some journey for the main character or just a way to put her through these paces for the director's fantasies to be played out on screen. Either way it all rings really hollow as we never emotionally connect to her or any other character at all. It is all window dressing to the situations on screen. Everything looks fantastic, but it never rises about that to become more. The whose who of the L.A. art scene are all over the place in this movie if you watch for them, mostly in a dinner sequence. But I spotted my friend the Reverend Tommy Gunn during a piercing at the club scene. First time seeing this.

Sunday May 18th 2008
I Was A teenage Strangler (1998) ** - Super trashy, ultra disgusting shot on video gunk that is important to smut fans because it is the debut of Misty Mundea (billed here as Lil' Erin DeWright!). But in truth she is barely in the movie until the last ten minutes or so and then she plays the typical last victim to the slasher movie conventions. So celebrity skin fans will be disappointed. The real star is her sister Chelsea (here billed as Daisey DeWright) who does things on screen I'm sure you've not seen before, or at least very, very rarely. The loose as a goose's ass plot revolves around a goofball who is having a party even though he knows no one in town. But everyone agrees to come because he is rich and lives in a nice house. He has a brother who is horribly burned on his face and has a rage problem that leads him to choke people. You can pretty much see where this is going. But in the interim there is as much bad taste thrown in as possible with a dude hypnotized into eating the shit out of Daisey's ass (huge mushy turds with peanuts in it) as she commands "Eat my turds, don't waste any of my precious turds!". (In the supplement it is explained the poo is made from brownie mix, so everyone can relax. It is gross though). There is a really nasty rape scene where the rapist has an awful unwiped butt (this time that looks real) and it climaxes with a real blow job after the poor girl has been punched and is spitting out blood. Real nice guys... Naturally this girl ends up pregnant and has to have an abortion, so Daisey (who I was unclear is her mother or lesbian lover?) performs a coat hanger job, were they jam a real hanger into this poor girls real vagina. They used gummi worms for the fetus, which I wont even go into what they do with that... The rest of the movie is just one strangling scene or lesbian grope fest (one that is actually kinda hot) after another. But the amazing thing is that all of this madness actually hangs together and builds to little bit of a plot by the end. This was a HUGE step up for director William Hellfire and his crew after the abysmal Caress of the Vampire 2 as this is actually fairly well put together. Though I'm thinking that it has been re-edited and scored for this DVD release as it seems very professionally done. This is still Shot On Video schlock but as far as that stuff goes this pushes the envelope a lot further than most and strives to have more going on. There is a lot of reference happening to seventies roughies and grindhouse movies and at times it almost gets that feel going. Not terrible if your in the mood for this kind of ultra bad taste, gross out, super-offensive trash. All else probably should avoid this like the plague. The DVD has trailers for a crapload of other Factory 2000 (Bill Hellfire's early "company") movies many of which look even more extreme. But those are the only extras. First time seeing this.