Project Vampire (1992)

Horror and Action movies love to open in media res.  That’s smart.  It instantly draws the audience in with the mystery of what the hell is going on, and it gives the filmmakers some breathing space to develop their characters and stories.  One of the great clichés of this type of opening is to have characters running away from someone or something, and Peter Flynn’s Project Vampire is no different.  Three scientists (we know they are scientists because they all wear bright white lab coats, all the better to hide from their pursuers) jog down various streets in Los Angeles (remember, always pronounce “Angeles” with a hard “g,” like in “gator”).  Invariably, these sequences end with the hunters catching up with their prey.  Of these particular three, one gets killed, one escapes and becomes villainous, and one gets picked up by student nurse Sandra (Mary Louise Gemmill) and, by default, becomes the hero of the film.  Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to have her rescue the one who goes bad?  At any rate, the opening of this movie does enough of what it needs to do.  We get a quick feel for the timbre of the film, we are introduced to most of the main players (including the cartoonishly colorful henchmen Hopper [Kelvin Tsao] and Louie [Ray Essler], who, tragically, is not “the guy who comes in and says his catch phrase over and over again”), and we get interested enough to give the film some more time to win us over.  Project Vampire could have been given a hundred years to win us over, and it still would fail miserably.

As to the plot, it involves the flagitious Dr. Frederick Klaus (Myron Natwick), an ancient vampire who has created a serum by which he can psychically control the vampires he creates.  Former fellow scientist Victor (he of the white lab coat and introductory trot to freedom, played by Brian Knudson) sets out to stop him.

Science and the supernatural have gone hand-in-hand ever since Dr. Frankenstein stitched together pieces from a bunch of corpses and imbued it with life.  What’s wonderful about this idea is that it has the opportunity to expand on a legend and give it a new spin, a new vantage point.  That doesn’t mean modernizing hoary stuff, per se.  After all, the classic Universal monster movies were set in contemporary times, but they still clung tenaciously to the old school, gothic atmosphere from which the base legends sprang.  What I like is things like Event Horizon which is basically a haunted house story set on a spaceship that has a literal gateway to Hell on it.  Brilliant.  Project Vampire has scientific elements in it, but there’s not much thought put into them.  The biggest leap this film takes is in expanding drastically on a vampire’s ability to control the minds of others.  That’s fine and dandy, but it also does so with no real explanation of how this works to begin with.  It doesn’t ground Klaus’ supernatural powers in the real world (even with a bunch of techno-jargon).  All it does is puts Klaus in some medieval-esque piece of equipment (I immediately thought of all the old horror films where naked women are held captive in some mad scientist’s lab with straps just large enough, and strategically placed, to not show us any of their naughty bits) that makes him “vamp out.”  Flynn and company, in fact, go so far as having bio-chemist Lee Fong (Christopher Cho) ask his computer, “What is a vampire’s most powerful strength?”  The thuddingly stupid response is, of course, “His psychic spell.  Destroy the vampire, destroy the spell.”  In terms of scientific breakthroughs, this ranks up there with Timmy Spudwell’s vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano experiments and Amanda Hugginkiss’ famous potato clock revolution.  Naturally, films like this don’t need to use real, hard scientific data to back up their ideas, but they do need to be convincing with what they serve up.  Project Vampire is simply dumb and confusing.  I re-watched segments of this film multiple times to try and make sense of what these people were saying, and all I did was further bewilder myself.  Would I have been more forgiving if this were a Eurohorror film, where I expect idiocy in its rationales?  Possibly, but I would have been no less nonplussed.

One of the more intriguing things this film gets up to and almost develops satisfyingly is its idea of eternal life and addiction.  This stems, primarily, from the core of the vampire mythos.  It’s not just that they need blood to survive.  They crave it.  It both enflames their passions and sates them.  Their fangs, like, say, hypodermic needles, pierce the veins of their victims.  Their victims, then, become like junkies, lusting for the return of those teeth to their skin, chasing the proverbial dragon.  Tom (Christopher Wolf) goes to a pal’s party, specifically looking for a blood meal.  He finds one in a woman he drags into the bathroom and begins to make out with before putting the bite on her.  Alongside the obvious sexual angle, I found myself thinking (perhaps in a severe bout of thematic overreach) of people sneaking off to go snort some coke.  In this scenario, Tom’s victim would be the coke.  In the film, it’s intimated that Lee used to make drugs for wealthy clients (I may have imagined this; so much of this film is nebulous even when it’s being blunt as fuck).  Klaus provides his Project Alpha serum to the wealthy elite who want eternal life, which is injected.  The price of this lifespan is their thrall to Klaus and his drug, especially once Klaus chooses to exert his psychic abilities over them.  Klaus is the pusher, long life is the drug, loss of identity is the come down/price of addiction.

Even in trash cinema, there should be something to not make you want to take a nap.  The thing which comes possibly closest to that herein is the henchmen, Hopper and Louie.  Louie is the Renfield character.  He limps, wears an eyepatch and a white-on-black suit, and grovels ceaselessly.  Hopper is a bald chunk of meat with a sadistic streak, a Kurgan who burns in the sun’s rays.  Their old married couple routine is almost entertaining.  Otherwise, the film’s leads have absolutely zero chemistry (see what I did there?).  Klaus and his mistress Heidi (Paula Randol-Smith) are as threatening as a comfy chair.  Lee has one of the worst “Oriental” accents ever put to film.  The script is terrible, muddled, and rote.  There isn’t nearly enough action, tits, or gore to paper over the film’s flaws.  It is painful to watch, not just in experience but in cinematography.  It looks bad.  I can see now who the filmmakers were targeting this film toward, because you would clearly need to be on a ton of bad drugs to enjoy it.

MVT:  Hopper is just an oddball.

Make or Break:  There’s a decent burn stunt at the film’s climax.  Credit where it’s due.

Score:  3/10 

Body Puzzle (1992)

Tracy Grant (Joanna Pacula) mourns the recent death of her husband while maintaining her career as a book editor.  Meanwhile, a deranged man (Francois Montagut) cuts up a series of victims, removes certain body parts, and sends them to her.  Intrepid detective Mike (Tomas Arana) is on the case!

Lamberto Bava’s Body Puzzle (aka Misteria) is a late-cycle giallo which plays more like a Cinemax erotic thriller (minus the eroticism) than a traditional giallo.  Bava learned much from his father Mario, and, if nothing else, the film is technically well-done.  There are a variety of murders, but only one of them is all that stylish or inventive.  Montagut spends the movie running around, knifing people practically in full view of any number of witnesses, and staring blankly at the world around him.  

As the story begins, the killer sits at a broken piano, fingering the dead keys to a recording we assume he made well in the past.  Like Don Music the Muppet, he smashes his hands and head into the keys which no longer sing for him like they used to.  This is the first indicator of the film’s dealing with the idea of the Self and the loss of same.  As the story unravels, we find out that Tracy also had a brother named Rad (who also recently passed away), and dead husband Abe and Rad may have known a certain unseemly character named Tim.  The removal of the victims’ body parts is a way for the killer to reconstruct Abe, for himself and for Tracy.  This becomes clear when it’s discovered that Abe’s coffin and remains were mysteriously disinterred and absconded with.  The killer’s physical identity is plain from the outset.  He doesn’t wear a black trenchcoat and black gloves.  If anything, he disguises his face with a stocking, but not from the audience.  He is also without personality, except in his murderous purpose.  The central question of the film is never “Who?” but “Why?”  Clearly, the killer is hellbent on becoming someone else to replace what he’s lost, but as a cinematic presence, he’s simply some stabby guy.

The film also concerns itself with the idea of the Observer and the Observed.  Bava makes stealthy and clever use of framing and reflections throughout the film in this regard.  As the killer trails a potential victim through a mall, we see her stare into a number of shop windows, her image reflected back at both she and us.  At the same time, the camera frames any number of mirrors and windows to show us the killer.  She never catches sight of him, but we do, and the way in which he is shown in these reflections (skewed, upside down, etcetera) emphasizes his Otherness.  Similarly, Bava uses POV shots to provide a voyeuristic sense to the film.  The killer watches Tracy at home through her bedroom window and her glass front door.  Of course, the reverse angles of these shots portray his perspective.  And yet, the POV is not always the killer’s.  Many of the tracking and Steadicam shots are from his viewpoint, moving along behind bannisters or clinging to the walls.  These we expect.  The other type of POV shots are his victims’.  One example peers up at the killer from underwater at a pool.  Another watches from inside a toilet as he lops a person’s hand off and it drops into the water (okay, that’s not an actual person’s POV, but it achieves the same effect).  These are shot from low angles, augmenting the killer as a figure in control and meant to be feared.  The undulating water distorts his image, making a mundane-looking guy into an apparition.  The director also wisely chooses to shoot many of the reactions to these POV shots at odd angles, almost never straight on.  The Observed “feels” the eyes of the Observer upon them, and the compositions reflect their unease.

There is also a hint of ideas about class in Body Puzzle, and while these are not central to the film, they do stand out the more one thinks about them.  Tracy comes from a moneyed family.  Mike is just a working class cop, and, naturally, he finds himself attracted to her (her physical desirability is matched by the wealth she possesses and doesn’t seem to pay much mind to).  Tracy can be seen as either a free spirit who does what she wants in spite of her parents’ wishes or because of them.  In other words, she “slums it” just to give them the finger, whether they know it or not.  As she tells Mike, Abe was a sort of gadabout.  He could do most things he set his hand to with some degree of facility, but he was not solid in the career department.  Further, Tracy’s father disapproved of Abe, believing that he was only there for the money.  Abe was a cocaine user, but, as his widow is quick to point out, not a junkie, though he always knew where to score (and note, she never states that she partakes herself).  Abe’s past is delved into, revealing seedier, lower class origins.  He used to live in a tiny portion of the flamboyantly gay Guy’s (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) carriage house.  After he married, he would bring his flings, male and female, there.  The film posits Abe as both a product of the lower class and an enthusiastic participant in it.  The stalking of the victims, the grimy, sweaty portrayal of the killer, and the way he looks in at Tracy’s life signify that he is also of the lower class.  He envies the Haves of the world, and this frustrates him to murder.  In that sense, his activities are as much a method of revenge on the upper class as it is a desire to enter or re-enter it.  The gathering of body parts is an offering as much as it’s an effigy, and it doesn’t quite matter to him that he is simultaneously destroying that which he seems to desire most.  

For as slick as Body Puzzle is, it is equally frustrating and tedious.  The plot points revolve around the killer stabbing someone and Tracy receiving a body part.  Mike takes some action which never moves him any closer to catching the murderer.  The dialogue between the characters is lifeless and cliché, more like small talk than anything progressing a narrative.  There is one major twist toward the end which is actually quite guileful in its revealing of how the audience has been duped.  Nonetheless, it also sends the audience’s mind reeling back through the rest of the film to consider just how sloppy and dimwitted the characters have all behaved up until this point.  Granted, many gialli don’t have the most coherent of solutions, but this one seems more brickheaded than the majority.  By the obvious, facile climax, Mike barely acknowledges Tracy’s presence (maybe he got all he wanted from her?), gets set to move on to the next case, and waltzes off into the night to get some much-needed sleep.  Unfortunately, the audience is already well ahead of him.

MVT:  Bava’s technical proficiency and what thoughtfulness he put into the film.

Make or Break:  The classroom scene.  It’s a delightful standout in a film that mostly sits down.

Score:  5/10         

Devil Girl 18 (1992)

**SPOILERS**

I have seen very little of Go Nagai’s Devilman anime outside of the OVAs released in the late Eighties/early Nineties.  I do have, but haven’t watched any of, the anime from the Seventies (looking forward to it, though).  I also have the original Mazinger Z series, although I have to admit that I’m a bit disappointed that the US version Tranzor Z (a show I watched on television as often as possible back in the Eighties) is not available.  I’ve also never seen any of the Cutie Honey series, but I am interested (who wouldn’t be interested in a naked female superhero?).  I love Nagai’s work, however.  He melds horror with science fiction with sex in a way I find gripping.  His characters go through some serious crap, and you’re never sure who’s going to come out on the other side, even the main characters.  It’s funny that, for how much I claim to admire his work, I’ve seen such a small sampling of it, but love is like that sometimes.  So, why such a scattershot, seemingly unrelated introduction to a film like Lam Wah-Chuen’s Devil Girl 18 (aka Mo Neui 18)?  Because the film itself is scattershot and seemingly unrelated to itself.  It also has the word “Devil” in the title.

Two demons (one male, one female) escape from Hell and travel to Earth.  There they possess the corpses of a duo of criminals (also one male, one female), and set about sucking the essence of forty-nine people who are “extremes of masculine and feminine” for some purpose which you will never fully understand (but rest assured, it’s bad).  Meanwhile, Nurse May Liou is tending to the comatose (but hardly braindead) Jay Lee, an antiques dealer who has some experience with ghosts and demons (and gender identity swapping).  May is engaged to Inspector Philip Kao, who is kind of/sort of investigating the trail of bodies left by the demons.  And there’s a Taoist priest with a chubby apprentice (named, of course, Fatty) who keeps giving grief to a horny ghost who enjoys possessing young men’s’ bodies and engaging in marathon sex with prostitutes.

Possession is one of the more interesting things going on in this film, and that’s mostly due to the implications of what that means for the possessee.  The loss of control, of identity, is something truly scary.  It’s a scenario many people experience (or variations thereof) in their worst nightmares.  Of course, said possessions, particularly in films of this ilk, also imbue the victims with special superpowers.  For example, the horny ghost, while in corporeal form, has a cock the size of a baseball bat (shown by having the actor literally wave a baseball bat from between his legs, mercifully only in silhouette) and the sexual stamina of a dildo.  The demon couple have more conventional superpowers, like shooting bolts from their fists and having champion-level martial arts skills.  But in either case, the needs behind the possessions are selfish in nature.  The horny ghost can’t make love in his normal state, and he wants to feel women’s flesh.  He doesn’t think about how he bankrupts his victims with his proclivities.  The demons desire to remain on Earth, and if they don’t complete their mission, their human bodies will explode (or something).  Humans are never possessed in films purely for observational reasons.  This only makes sense, since otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story in any of them.  But we relate, because our bodies and minds are sacrosanct, and the violation of them, their possible obliteration, is horrifying on a gut level (in much the same way as the sympathy pains we get when characters cut themselves or step on a nail).

More prominent than that aspect here is the idea of the power that sex and the desire for pleasure hold in this cinematic world.  Being a Category III film (and I’m not entirely sure why, considering how staid many of the sexual components in the film are when they’re not being played for laughs), sex plays a huge role in almost every scene.  When the demons are introduced in Hell, the female attempts to entice her guard into letting her go free in exchange for sex.  The female criminal on Earth (pre-possession) seduces the only other male member of the gang right in front of her boyfriend.  May dresses in sexy lingerie and shows Philip some tit, but refuses to go all the way.  The pros at the brothel gyrate and squeeze their boobs for their clients (but mostly for the camera).  The female demon seduces a nightclub owner before sucking his essence (which is self-explanatory in its connotations) and exploding his head (also self-explanatory).  Fatty only comes into his own (more or less, but mostly less) after he tries to lose his virginity at the brothel (there’s an iron bra involved).  The big climax (ahem) involves characters engaging in sex (guess which two characters) in order to depower the demons, and this is the most important instance of them all.  The male demon steals the essence of females, the female from males.  They are separated in this aspect, as well as in their not touching each other in a sexual manner (or not that I can recall).  By joining with each other through sex, the protagonists combine their essences (they also do it on a table decorated with the yin and yang symbol, underscoring the interconnectedness of the feminine and masculine opposites), and in this unity prove themselves more powerful than the antagonists.  

And yet, for the inherent potential present in the film’s sexual features, both they, and the film on a whole, are simply wasted effort (and, to be frank, the effort doesn’t even seem to really be there, anyway).  Now, I know absolutely zero about the background of this film’s production, but I feel confident in stating that the producers got their hands on some footage from several other films and just built what story they could around it (and Godfrey Ho wasn’t even involved, to my knowledge).  To wit: while he’s in the hospital, Jay spends the whole time with bandages covering his face.  All of the scenes where we can actually see him are in flashbacks (which have sweet fuck all to do with the sex demon narrative), and at no time in these sequences does he interact with any other character from the main story.  Speaking of which, if you go into this expecting a Yukari Oshima film (as I did), prepare for disappointment.  If the actress is in a collective five minutes of this film, that would be a lot.  Sure, it’s always nice to see her, and she does get to do a little fighting, but it’s not nearly enough to raise the level of this movie even one iota.  There are also scenes clearly taken from older films that are jammed into this film just to provide a bit of cheap action.  All of which brings me to the film’s “humorous” attributes.  There’s something to be said for juvenile-level slapstick and off-color jokes, but Devil Girl 18 has some of the weakest, most groan-inducing comedic moments ever put to film.  This isn’t entirely unexpected, because the funny bone of many Hong Kong films does tend to be rather oddly misplaced, but it also doesn’t make them work any better.  Also, the way the movie shifts between the funny scenes and the more serious scenes (which are, admittedly, still pretty goofy) really made me wonder just what the fuck Wah-Chuen was going for, or if he even cared at all.  I’m positive, in his heart of hearts, only he knows for sure.

MVT:  I like the base storyline, because it had real possibilities, none of which come to fruition.

Make or Break:  When the “funny” music kicks in, and Nurse Liou is instructed to smell Jay’s breath for stinkiness (hint: it’s not he that stinks), you know you’re in for a long haul.

Score:  4.5/10