In short: .357 Magnum (1977)

American Jonathan "Johnny" Hightower (James Whitworth) works as a contract secret agent for some British-accented guy with the most frightening hair I have ever seen. The hair monster wants Johnny to kill another guy called Clay. Clay is in ChinatownHong Kong and then moves on to ChinatownTokyo. He walks a lot, has vague phone conversations but also shoots a few people.

Johnny thinks he's going to need help for this one, so he seeks out an alcoholic gunman named Steven he is friends with. Steve likes to talk in close-ups that hide his mouth. They shoot, they philosophize, then they shoot some more. They visit the OK corral so that Steven can philosophize some more. All the while, Clay has been walking and working his phone.

When it's time for our heroes to spring into action, it's also time for a Priscilla Alden cameo. And betrayal! And a five minute scene of a woman licking a vibrator! Then vengeance!

If you haven't entered the peculiar world of directing force of un-nature Nick Millard until now, .357 Magnum would probably be too exhausting a place to start. I'd recommend Criminally Insane as a less disturbing starting point.

If, on the other hand, you already have made contact with Millard's work, you will recognize his style at once. The unmoving (possibly unmovable) camera, the a-rhythmic and illogical editing, Millard's weird talent for making even those scenes in which all contributing actors are present at the same time look as if they aren't, the rough sound and the nearly perverse use of library music.

Everyone on screen is stiffly staring into the direction of the camera, muttering dialogue with all the conviction and emotion of someone who has been dead inside for years. I still hope there's a zombie film hidden away somewhere in the director's back catalogue. That would truly be a match made in the special heaven that's reserved for all things improbably painful and beautiful.

The movie's plot barely makes sense (and what sense there is nearly completely destroyed by its confused storytelling), and yet it's presented with an utterly weird weight of conviction, as if Millard, in making films most people wouldn't even call films, had found a source of disquieting earnestness that leads his films as far away from the fun playing around of other no-budget productions of this kind as it can be lead. Millard seems to follow his own internal logic, a logic that might be incomprehensible for anyone not Millard, but which is logic nonetheless. Even the scene - coming right before the so-called finale to rob that of any possible excitement that might have built up for it in a viewer - of the guy with the hair (wasn't he in Millard's Satan's Black Wedding?) watching the woman licking her vibrator feels as if it would make sense to someone able to look into Millard's head.

And what an interesting place to live in that head must be.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,action,nick millard,in short

In short: Criminally Insane 2 (1987)

aka Crazy Fat Ethel 2

After the occurrences in Criminally Insane, always hungry serial killer Ethel (Priscilla Alden) has spent the last ten years in an asylum again, whiling away her time eating and flashing back to the first film.

As it goes, budget cuts make it necessary that never cured serial killers are put in halfway houses, and Ethel is the perfect candidate. Surely, nothing can go wrong when she confuses the head of the her new home with her granny and one of her co-patients with the cop who arrested her! 

But before Ethel can have her killing relapse, there's time for more flashbacks, exciting scenes of a co-patient wiggling his hands and eating flies, about an hour of footage of a guy putting dog food on plates and even more flashbacks. Well, what's half an hour of a viewer's life?

Later, there will also be some business with the pseudo-cop co-patient trying to blackmail Ethel, but I was already so drowsy at that point of the proceedings that I don't remember any relevant details. I highly doubt there were any.

I thought the first Criminally Insane was a little wonder as far as kitchen-sink horror films go, with a slightly campy but down to earth aesthetic you don't usually see in the idealization-prone serial killer movie. Its SOV sequel of twelve years later however is quite a different thing. It is a Frankensteinian effort, half of the film consisting of re-used footage of its shot on film and comparably lavish looking predecessor and the other half of painfully dull and ugly looking new footage, most probably shot with a consumer grade video camera. The contrast between the two types of scenes only emphasises how bad the video material looks.

The camera work is as static as possible. Director Nick Millard seems to have forgotten everything he knew about composition or effective editing and instead applies his forbidden new knowledge of the "Sleep" spell (a successful Will saving throw results in drowsiness instead of sleep) with frightening enthusiasm.

The acting isn't much better. Priscilla Alden still has quite a presence and puts a lot of energy in her campy performance, but the rest of the cast just sits there and drones their dialogue as if someone had forgotten to tell them they were being filmed and not just going through their lines for rehearsal.

Still, I didn't find Criminally Insane 2 completely uninteresting, just fantastically boring. I did love the first film, after all, and the body of this sequel wears that film's stitched-on head beside its own with pride. It is possible that this makes Criminally Insane 2 the manster of horror. It is also possible that I have finally suffered brain damage through bad movies.

 

Technorati-Tags: in short,horror,nick millard,priscilla alden

In short: Criminally Insane (1975)

Ah, Ethel (Priscilla Alden)! Put into an asylum because of her violent outbursts, regularly treated with electro shocks and still not healed. And her doctor is giving her back into the care of her grandmother (Jane Lambert) anyway. He'll probably regret it, if only for a very short moment.

He's a great doctor, he is, and so he recommends to Gramma that she should decrease heavily overweight Ethel's calorie intake, which is obviously the right thing to do with someone with the delusion that others want to starve her.

One prevented meal comes to the other and a kitchen knife finds Granny's back. Finally Ethel can eat whenever she wants and how much she wants. Or so she thinks.

In truth, Ethel will have a lot of troublesome people to deal with before she can eat peacefully. There are delivery boys, psychiatrists, sisters who work as prostitutes and evil boyfriends to take care of. Ethel will also have to learn that keeping the dead bodies of one's victims locked away in one's home is a stinky business.

Criminally Insane was made in Oakland by the prolific low-low-budget filmmaker Nick Millard (also known as Nick Phillips). As the others of his films I've seen, it's technically crude (but obviously trying very hard to make the best of its budget), raw and rather fascinating.

What sounds like a mean series of jokes about overweight people is given a sense of humanity and reality by Priscilla Alden's spot-on performance. Alden is as good as any semi-professional actress I've ever seen, mostly working through presence and a line delivery that might have been much too affectless for a different role, but fits perfectly here.

The film mostly plays out as an 70s psycho movie reduced to its bare essentials, brought back to an ugly semi-reality of provincial life with casual racism and violence, but also given some gloriously funny moments that work as added reality checks. The scene in which Ethel finally wants to do something about her corpse problem by burying her victims in the garden, only to be first annoyed by a nosy neighbour peeking over the fence and then completely prevented from realizing her plan by the simple fact that the soil is bad for digging alone is worth the price of admission. Ethel is the perfect antidote to the sexy, suave serial killer of today.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,nick millard,horror,comedy,priscilla alden,in short

Satan's Black Wedding (1975)

A young woman (who knows who plays her?) has weird dreams that seem to drive her into cutting up her arms and moaning. While a very hairy mustache-wearer with cheap plastic fangs looks on, she dies of her wounds.

We now learn that she is the sister of a young actor called Mark (Greg Braddock, looking for all the world like someone who mistakenly thinks he looks like Elvis himself). What do you know, the priest on her funeral is the same guy we saw earlier on!

When Mark arrives back at the home of his sister, a cop tells him that her supposed suicide was not a suicide at all, but something much darker and stranger. Her body was found bloodless and missing a finger (how exactly this was ruled a suicide is beyond me, but what do I know of police work?). Next, we are in a dark and dank crypt, where Dakin, the priest, mumbles the usual stuff about Satan to make the sister's first minutes as a vampire as unpleasant as possible. He also informs us (she does know this already, so that's very nice of him) that it is her first duty to kill all her living relatives to "fulfill the satanic covenant" or something like that.

As luck would have it, Mark is just visiting their sick aunt. He is not just concerned about her health, he wants to ask her if she knows where the manuscript of the novel his sister was working could be found. She has it and hands him his very own copy.

He goes back home to read it. Now a very strange phenomenon occurs. We see him at home, reading the manuscript by daylight, intercut with his dear sister slaughtering auntie and her maid (which takes the definition of family quite far, thank you very much) by night. It must be a time paradoxon.

Let's make the rest of the film short: Mark meets his ex-girlfriend, who helped his sister write the book, they leave town to escape being killed, have sex, are being watched by sis. Mark leaves ex-girlfriend alone to do whatever, cop has fun in the crypt, sis vamps ex-girlfriend, ex-girlfriend leads Mark into a trap, vampires hunt Mark, Satan marries vampire-sis and zombie-Mark to produce a child. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Ah, Mid-Seventies inadvertent anti-realism, how I love you! There is not much that is more beautiful than the strange transformation of pure incompetence into a kind of parallel cinema of the slightly demented mind.

Satan's Black Wedding has all the hallmarks of its special sub-genre: The seemingly drugged, completely (e)motionless zombie-like acting; camera set-ups that stay static as much as possible - moving the camera around is awfully costly, after all; the cut and the slightly skewed camera angle as main feature of visual style; a happy ignorance of continuity that sometimes transcends the concept of continuity itself and becomes what I like to call anti-continuity (see also: anti-life equation, the); a script full of the wrong transitions, non-sequiturs and lacking a semblance of logic.

All this and more many-named director Nick Millard achieves absolutely effortlessly. What develops (slowly, oh so very slowly) is a special and precious film, absolutely hypnotic in its own way and of the beauty one can find only in movies and junkyards.

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,the very weird,reviews