From a Whisper to a Scream (1987)

aka The Offspring

Librarian and Southern small town historian Julian White (Vincent Price) gets a surprise visit by a journalist (Susan Tyrrell) who wants to interview him about his niece Katherine (Martine Bestwick). Katherine has just been executed for a string of murders she committed, and since she grew up under Julian’s care, he’s rather expected to have some insight into her state of mind.

What the old gent actually does is start onto a series of short tales to explain that the town of Oldfield where all of this takes place is and has been home to a cornucopia of murders and depravity, so Katherine’s case should come as no surprise.

Of course, this being a horror anthology, these tales are its segments.

The first tale, “Stanley” concerns the misadventures of mild-mannered and repressed grocer Stanley (Clu Gulager). At home, he is taking care if his ailing sister Eileen (Miriam Byrd-Nethery) who radiates incestuous intensity – at least she seems to be really into passive-aggressively dominating her brother. On his grocer job, Stanley is pining after his boss lady, Grace (Megan McFarland). He even manages to go on a date with her, but when she rebukes him, he murders her and later does the necrophiliac thing. Which really will have some rather unexpected results nine months later.

The second segment, “On the Run”, follows ne'er-do-well Jesse Hardwick (Terry Kiser), who has incensed a couple of rather brutal gangsters, as well as his girlfriend. Chased into a swamp and shot, Jesse regains consciousness in the care of an older black man named Felder Evans (Harry Caesar), a hoodoo practitioner. Sniffing around Felder’s cabin, Jesse finds out that his host must be at least two-hundred years old. He presses Felder to teach him the trick to this sort of longevity. The old man does agree at first, yet Jesse’s generally shitty disposition does sour their relationship rather violently. Which, obviously, isn’t a great idea.

Tale number three, “Lovecraft’s Traveling Amusements” (disappointingly enough not featuring any Lovecraftian content) concerns the tragic romance of the titular carnival’s glass eater, Steven (Ron Brooks) and local beauty Amaryllis (Didi Lanier). Unfortunately, this is no normal travelling carnival but one belonging to a witch (Rosalind Cash) – only going by Snakewoman – who grants her various carnies (all with a problematic past) carny super powers and shelter in return for her dominance over them, and perhaps a bit of mutilation. As you can imagine, her glass eater attempting to run off with a girl does rather displease the woman.

Finally, we have “Four Soldiers”, wherein a group of Union soldiers under the brutal, drunken leadership of Sgt. Gallen (Cameron Mitchell), encounter a group of war orphans – most of them demonstrating scars of war themselves – dwelling in a dilapidated mansion. The children manage to take the men prisoner, as per the rules set by the mysterious “Magistrate” they say they serve. Children being children, they do like to play games with their captives.

As directed by Jeff Burr (who would of course later go on to Charles Band’s Full Moon Pictures as well as specialize in horror sequels of dubious renown yet not always dubious quality) and written by Burr, Darin Scott (whom you might know as writer and producer of the brilliant Tales from the Hood among other things), Mike Malone, and C. Courtney Joyner (another future Band alumni), From a Whisper to a Scream is a pretty wild and gruesome bit of US Southern horror.

In mood and style and it marries EC horror – nearly a given in US horror anthologies – with Southern Gothic, leaning on the pulp gruesomeness of the former instead of the somewhat more subtle and elegant ways of Southern Gothic, where terrible fucked-up shit happens, but usually does so with a pretence of civility. This one rather feels mad like a wild dog, aggressively leaning into the most gruesome elements of the material, cutting away the politeness and ambiguity that to me seems as much part of your typical Southern Gothic piece as are incest, necrophilia and the horrors of slavery and what came after. As an approach this makes perfect sense for a horror movie from the 80s, of course, and not just commercially. While this never feels like a movie seeing it as its main goal to hammer home a political point, it really does put a lot of effort into portraying its American South as a place with a history literally drenched in blood, and suggests this as the worst possible influence on the people living there.

Helping in this effort is some really rather great low budget filmmaking by Burr, who drenches nearly every frame in fecundity and sweat, and lingers on the decaying locations with a lot of wicked enthusiasm and quite a bit of style.

I also can’t help but admire From a Whisper’s absolute willingness to go into creepy, gruesome and pleasantly uncomfortable places and really go there. Even though this isn’t a gore fest – I suspect mostly because it couldn’t afford to be – this is not a film cutting to black politely. There’s a real, admirable, pulp energy and ruthlessness running through all of the film’s segments, as well as a wonderful, and wonderfully gruesome, sense of imagination.

Thanks to the curious economics of anthology horror – where getting a great actor for five affordable days can be enough to shoot a segment – and some great casting choices, there’s also at least one really great performance in every segment. Price is of course the international treasure we know and love, but there’s also Gulager’s go-for-broke outing as Stanley, Harry Caesar’s calm and off-handed warlock, Rosalind Cash’s grand, horrible, villainess. Hell, even Cameron Mitchell puts obvious effort into creating a man of very specific vileness here, instead of coasting by on drinks and general professionalism.

So, to me, this is one of the great underrated anthology films.

Past Misdeeds: Supersonic Man (1979)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

aka Sonic Man (which I can only imagine to be a side story about our hero’s less favoured brother)

Poor Professor Morgan (José María Caffarel)! He is such a genius when it comes to energy SCIENCE! (energytology?), that evil, perhaps ever so slightly crazy, villain Dr. Gulik (Cameron Mitchell) sends out a bunch of his sub-COBRA goons and one of his oh so very impressive killer robots to kidnap him, somehow making the authorities believe the good Professor defected somewhere leaving a lot of dead bodies behind.

Fortunately, some aliens have decided that enough is enough with all that human nonsense, and have sent out superhero Supersonic (Richard Yesteran) to take care of business on Earth. When he’s not flying around to a one-finger synthesizer version of the Superman theme, or activating his varied superpowers via finger pointing and weird hand gestures, Supersonic (probably not Supes to his friends for copyright reasons) works as a moustachioed private eye. In this function he more or less stumbles (we shouldn’t ascribe to purpose what we can ascribe to random chance in this movie) upon Morgan’s daughter Patricia (Diana Polakov), who doesn’t believe her father could do anything morally dubious at all, and could really use a private eye to find him.

The private eye business will turn out to be Supersonic’s greatest weakness once he gets down to the whole thwarting evil Dr. Gulik, rescuing good Professor Morgan business, because like all private eyes, he too has the tendency to get conked in the head from behind, which makes life somewhat difficult for a superhero who needs to talk into – or at least think at – his (magic) space watch to transform. Hopefully, random chance will help him out there too.

I’m not much of a fan of the Italian and Spanish rip-offs of Superman, perhaps because I already don’t find the original to be exactly riveting (I’m very sorry, but Superman as a character does little for me, probably because I find perfection incredibly boring), but most probably because most of the resulting films were neither particularly inspired nor particularly crazy, which could only ever leave us with a shoddy superhero movie. [Future me’s position towards the first two Superman movies has rather improved, yet I still don’t like the rip-offs any better].

Juan Piquer Simón’s Supersonic Man is the great exception to the rule, because while it’s as shoddy, dumb, and silly as three other cheap superhero movies combined, it is also a film containing oh so many indelible charms I find it utterly impossible to resist it. There may be little the film does actually right – except for Simón’s frequent cinematographer Juan Mariné’s surprisingly pleasant photography – but most everything it does wrong, it does in delightful ways that’ll convince you a man in a cape can fly over a fake yet beautiful model of a house.

What the film, or rather Simón, does particularly right is finding a way to actually awaken Cameron Mitchell from the stupor he is in during too many of his low budget nonsense outings and get him to chew the scenery in his own inimitable way, like a prettier William Shatner on very bad drugs. During the course of the film, Mitchell gets to chew and spit out not only scenery, helpless co-actors, and possibly your mind, he also has at least half a dozen great, absolutely ridiculous villain speeches. If you’re really lucky, he does give these while having “philosophical” – which in the context of this film means “deeply stupid” - discussions with Caffarel’s Professor, whom he always keeps at his side to have someone to gloat at. Caffarel, speaking lots and lots of more loquacious versions of the words “tut, tut, you evil madman” does make a contrast that helps Mitchell shine extra bright, too, for where dear old Mister Mitchell gloats, gesticulates and mugs, Caffarel is clearly above emoting (or really, moving too much), possibly because he’s afraid that Mitchell will eat him too.

There are many other joys to be had in Supersonic Man, and not just the way Supersonic (the Man is clearly implicit) goes out of his way to not help henchmen in need (making the last Superman movies look much friendlier all of a sudden), or the fact that the film is absolutely hilarious, except in those moments when it is actually trying to be hilarious through that most horrid type of comic relief – a homeless comedy alcoholic. I could probably go on listing things for a few thousand words, but it’ll be better for everyone’s sanity if I only mention one or two.

So, there’s that famous scene where Supersonic lifts a barely three-dimensional steamroller out of Patricia’s way, like a real champ (if a real champ were a guy who cheats outrageously), with said steamroller having been built (probably in half an hour of somebody’s lunch break) either from very light wood (if you’re the more kindly minded type of thinker), or actual papier-mâché (if you’re more of a glass half empty kind of mutant). In any case, the great beauty of his scene is not just that the steamroller is clearly not a steamroller but how utterly shameless Simón is about it, obviously not caring one bit that his audience notices the extreme short cuts he’s willing to take. Curiously, in this film, that approach doesn’t look so much like a director looking down at his audience and his film than like a guy sharing a private moment with us.

As a second example, there are Gulik’s killer robots. They are silver, they have tasteful little glowing lamps, they have tiny rockets, they have in-built flame-throwers, they have in-built gas-throwers, they are so fast (cough) they can move at least three or four meters a minute (Simón already training for Slugs?), and they look exactly like giant toy robots. In fact, they look and feel exactly like what an eight year old would find awesome in a robot, so again, Simón seems to know what he’s doing with them.

These robots, as well as the film’s approach to special effects, also suggest to me that, while the film is clearly meant to rip-off the Donner Superman film, Simón is actually working off the much older serial model for Supersonic, something that also explains the film’s stop and start episodic plotting, the archetypal characters, and the way the action scenes are staged just as well, perhaps even better, than mere ineptitude would. One might even start to think there’s no ineptitude involved here at all but a rather clever and private revival of an often forgotten style of filmmaking hidden away in plain sight.


Or I just might be crazy, but then, so’s Dr. Gulik, and he gets all the best lines. Soon you will know the true force.

On ExB: Supersonic Man (1979)

What can you say about Supersonic Man, a true classic of the superhero movie genre, if by classic you mean cheap and silly rip-off of a more popular movie?

Turns out quite a bit, as clicking through to my column over at the energetically pointing Exploder Button will demonstrate, though I’m not so much “saying” as writing a love letter there.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,superheroes,comedy,juan piquer simón,cameron mitchell,richard yesteran,diana polakov,josé maría caffarel

In short: Slaughter (1972)

Someone murders the father of Vietnam war hero (since when was there such a thing?) Slaughter (Jim Brown) in what looks a lot like a mafia hit. Slaughter knew his father was involved in shady dealings but he still takes the assassination personally, and starts a hunt for the killer that suggests his name to be his program too.

Slaughter’s violent ways awaken the interest of racist US treasury department man A.W. Price (Cameron Mitchell) who recruits our very angry hero for his own war against mafia capo Mario Felice (Norman Alfe) and his main underling Dominic Hoffo (Rip Torn), informing Slaughter that Felice is the man responsible for Slaughter senior’s death, and putting him on his trail in Mexico. Supposedly, Slaughter is to follow orders and act somewhat less extreme than is his usual style but of course, soon people die left and right, things explode, and Hoffo’s girlfriend Ann (Stella Stevens), as well as treasury department agent Harry (Don Gordon) are charmed by Slaughter’s manly man ways. The whole affair has something to do with the mafia’s new super computer, the replacement of the old mafia guard with the new, and a casino.

However, the plot really is beside the point for Slaughter’s director Jack Starrett, and is only there to enable Jim Brown to be awesome, cool and violent, sometimes awesomely violent, and to give the film an excuse to take short breaks from its own overwhelming Jim Brown-ness to provide its audience with short but sweet moments of ridiculous mafia clichés. Which, close study of Slaughter suggests, might be all I ever dreamed of.

The fact that Slaughter is as entertaining an entry in the blaxploitation cycle as it is has a lot to do with Starrett’s sure hand for action scenes whose controlled wildness often reminded me of classic serial action, filmed with all the stylistic tics of a film made in the early 70s, yet also with a sense of excitement and an exhilarating air you don’t always get from your low budget cinema (of any era), because excitement isn’t cheap. There are even car chases I enjoyed watching, something that happens about every six months to someone who is not at all a car person like me.

Then there is, of course, Jim Brown, swaggering, running, looking constipated, romancing, shooting and making things explode in a manner that can’t help but convince one of Slaughter’s main thesis, namely, that Jim Brown is a total bad-ass, admired by men like his white sidekick Harry, loved by women, and only hated by racist arseholes and mafiosi.

What Slaughter isn’t is a movie with a subtext that tells us anything about the black experience, or even white writers’ interpretation of what a black audience might want to see on screen as a dramatization of the black experience, going for a pure power (and perhaps empowerment) fantasy even mostly lacking the semi-documentary scenes of urban squalor so typical of the genre. It would be easy to criticize Slaughter for this if the film wouldn’t permanently distract one with wild action and Jim Brown.

But then, sometimes wild action and Jim Brown are exactly what you need in your life.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,blaxploitation,action,jack starrett,jim brown,stella stevens,rip torn,cameron mitchell

Trapped Alive (1993)

It's Christmas all over the world. While lawyer John Adams (oh no, it's Cameron Mitchell!) is having a party, a trio of cons - the psychopaths Face (Alex Kubik) and Mongo (Michael Nash) and the misunderstood poor woobie Randolph "Randy" Carter (Mark Witsken) break out of prison.

Desperately in need of a car, they nap Adams's daughter Robin - actually named Lucy, for some reason - (Sullivan Hester) and his assistant Monica (Laura Kallison), who are on their way to a different party. Somehow - the physics of the scene are confusing and possibly damaging to the brain - the cons, the girls and the car fall down an old mineshaft, where they are stranded in the dark.

While the mine-shafted group is still getting their bearings, cop Billy Williams (Randy Powell) arrives at the scene, yet somehow misses car, big hole in the ground and mineshaft completely. Instead, he makes the acquaintance of a woman (Elizabeth Kent) living nearby with her permanently snoring husband. After a painful dialogue scene that ends with the woman babbling about her dead daddy, Billy and her take care of the necessary sex scene - with the snoring husband in the next room.

At the same time when Billy is having his fun, the rest of the cast realizes they're not alone in their new mineshaft home. A very hairy, elderly cannibal who likes drop down from the ceiling on a hook, roams the mine looking for a cheap meal. Cue ridiculous deaths and fight for survival.

Of course, Billy will land down there too once he notices the big damn hole in front of his new girlfriend's house, and of course, his new girlfriend will turn out to be the cannibal's daughter in the end. Oops, spoiler.

Well, even if you've become as used to watching horrible movies and somehow extracting some actual worth besides laughter from their useless bones as I have, a film like Trapped Alive still comes along and proves itself as pretty much unsalvageable beyond laughing at it, putting another point of data behind my theory that everything Cameron Mitchell guest stars or cameos in must scientifically suck. Here, the Mitch (brother in spirit and lack of talent to the Shat), is there to look moping at pictures, mumble complete nonsense, talk to himself melodramatically for one scene, nod off in a chair (finally, a full scene of hot Cameron Mitchell nappy time action), and hug the protagonist, all things he does in that trademarked Cameron Mitchell way, that is, looking bored and asleep even when he's supposed to be awake.

The most surprising thing about Trapped Alive is that Mitchell's scenes aren't the worst part of the movie. In fact, the film is so full of horrible, but at least somewhat hilarious, nonsense it's pretty difficult to tell what's its worst aspect. Is it the elderly cannibal with his big white wig? Is it the fact that every character here should be too stupid to be able to ever leave his or her bed and therefore shouldn't even be able to get into danger? Is it Leszek Burzynski's direction that repeatedly manages to change its mind about the position of characters, the form and size of rooms and the laws of physics during a single scene? Is it the script, with its non-plot happening to characters so clichéd as to become absurd (would you believe Robin falls in love with one of the guys who kidnapped her? or anything else happening in the movie?)?

Well, to be honest, I know what's the worst - and therefore also the best - part of Trapped Alive is. It's the long, long monologue Elizabeth Kent's (the IMDB's totally wrong about her role in the movie, by the way) character Rachel holds at the film's climax, where she explains the film's backstory, her relation to the cannibal, and how you make a tomb with pre-installed dynamite, while snot, badly faked tears and strange bubbling noises just stream from her face. It's a scene so great in its wrongness no description could ever do it justice.

If the rest of the film is worth giggling through to get there will probably depend on one's pain threshold.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,leszek burzynski,sullivan hester,cameron mitchell,elizabeth kent

Kung Fu Cannibals (1982)

aka Raw Force

Visit beautiful Warrior's Island. Once a place disgraced martial artists visited to commit suicide, it is now mainly populated by a small group of monks with peculiar dietary habits. They only eat the flesh of attractive young women. Is it a religious thing? The taste? Scientists' opinions are divided.

Obviously, when you are living on a remote island, the opportunities to buy and sell pre-packaged human flesh are scarce. To solve this problem, the monks have made a deal with a guy sporting Adolf Hitler's facial hair and an accent that unhappily hovers between fake German and fake French, trading jade from their jade mines against pseudo-Hitler's weekly haul of kidnapped prostitutes. All goes well until disaster strikes the peaceful cannibal/Nazi community.

A cruise ship full of American weekend martial artists and women fond of dropping their clothes without any provocation, captained by Cameron Mitchell (for once conscious and awake during the shoot), has set sail/motor for Warrior's Island.

At first, mock-Hitler tries to just warn them away, but rambling warnings by randomly appearing strangers not to visit the island don't cut it with these Americans.

Next, some not so subtle attacks by the accented one's henchpeople aren't too successful either. Turns out that martial artists are quite fond of using their martial arts on people trying to kill them.

A surprise attack on the cruise ship on the high seas is a bit more effective. The ship explodes marvellously, and only a handful of the Americans survive. Alas, their life boats are carrying them directly to the island they weren't supposed to go to.

Now, only the zombiefied (and quite sprightly) remains of the warriors who gave Warrior's Island its name can protect the future of monkly flesh-eating and the Nazi jade trade.

Well, Kung Fu Zombies is certainly something. You might be as surprised as I was to learn that it's not something good, well-filmed and deeply moving, but a silly action film/sex comedy/random crap abomination directed by the guy who played a certain "Captain" in Mad Doctor of Blood Island and has numerous stints in exciting sounding roles like "Prospective Male Juror" and "Parole Board Member" on Law & Order - at least if you are willing to believe the IMDB.

For a bit-playing actor, Murphy isn't too bad a director. At least his film (which, as you might have guessed, is a US/Filipino co-production) is vaguely coherent and surprisingly enough not too boring, both things I have learned not to take as a given in films with utterly fantastic titles (like this one has when it is not shown under a terrible generic one). I even found myself laughing about the comedic bits from time to time. Not at the scenes that were supposed to be funny, of course, but oh well.

Most of the film plays out as if it were the product of a bet concerning the amount of stupid shit (and breasts, obviously) you can or cannot throw into one script. I certainly can't argue that a mix of bad martial arts, cannibalistic monks, Nazi gangsters (or whatever they are supposed to be), Cameron Mitchell and martial arts zombies is something of a bad movie dream come true.

But even beyond the power of its pure, conceptional exploitation idiocy, this film has a lot to recommend it. First and foremost, there's a surprising amount of stuff happening in it. While talking about plot progression or character development like films sane people watch are rumoured to have would just be a lie, there's always some stupid and absurd crap going on to keep the enchanted viewer awake. That nothing of what's happening on screen makes much sense or is any good doesn't reduce the film's entertainment value at all. At least, Murphy is trying very hard to present us with the things his film's titles promise. I'll just ignore the fact that the cannibals don't do any kung fu, because kung fu zombies are much better anyway.

On a technical level, most people would call the film atrocious, I suppose, but apart from a ghastly/wonderful amount of continuity errors, there's nothing anybody in the target group of the movie should have any problems with. Of course, the zombie make-up only consists of blue paint, of course, the exploding ship looks utterly hilarious, of course, nobody on screen (apart from Cameron Mitchell, absurdly enough) can or does act, of course, the fight choreography is no such thing. But, compared to the siren song of words like "cannibal monk" or "kung fu zombie", all these are only silent whispers of the disagreeable.

Let me repeat: Cameron Mitchell is awake (and unfunny comic relief)! Cannibal monks! Kung fu zombies! Pretend-Hitler!

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,filipino movies,action,comedy,exploitation,reviews,cameron mitchell

The Horror!? 86: The Demon (1979)

A very slow and delibaretly working killer kidnaps the daughter of a burgeois family. Though he kills again and has obviously no intention of hiding his victims, the girl's body is never found. Her parents, desperate for any kind of closure, seek out the help of soldier-turned-clairvoyant Bill Carson (Cameron Mitchell, as always badly in need of his drinking money).

Since all his sniffing on pieces of clothes doesn't lead to any helpful visions, the movie merrily jumps to a pair of young women (sisters? cousins? - I am not completely sure and will certainly not watch parts of this again to find out), whose boring love lifes and all-around annoyingness will accompany us for the rest of the movie. There is hope, though, because our friend, the very slow killer stalks the two women, albeit even more slowly. From time to time we look in on him anyway, and see him standing, standing or standing and washing his mask (that seems to be able to teleport onto and off of his skull at will).

At this point I had high hopes to at least see the clairvoyant guy again, but no chance. Carson is finally able to tell where the killer lives. He even seems to have an especially good day concerning visions - he also prophecises that the father will not survive his short moment of Charles Bronson vigilantism against the Slow One.

All of this comes true, but of course The Demon still finds the time to show us the sisters of boredom again and again and again.

Actually, it shows us the two that often and extensive that there isn't much time to wrap the film up, so Cameron Mitchell is disposed of in one of the stupidest twists imaginable and the killer can finally strike.

Oh, there are South African horror films? I hesitate to call this a horror film, I even hesitate to call it a film.

It's an absolutely dire attempt to make a slasher movie (at least I suspect it is meant to be one), one of those films that don't get anything right except a nearly mystical aura of utter cluelessness and boredom.

At least I know what to do the next time I can't sleep.

 

Technorati-Tags: horror,cameron mitchell,reviews,slasher,south african movies