Horrible High Heels (1996)

Hey, let’s talk about my feet!  For as long as I can remember, my feet have been grotesquely wide (around a triple E width, if that helps any).  The last pair of normal sneakers I had were Welcome Back Kotter ones when I was a kid (it said, “Up Your Nose with a Rubber Hose” and other snazzy bon mots around the sides).  I could never wear Chuck Taylors, because my feet poured out over the tops of the soles (but fuck if I didn’t try).  My first pair of Doc Martens were regular width (because that’s all that anyone sold, and this was before they were available on every street corner in the world, and they were expensive as all hell compared to the shoes I would normally buy), and the breaking-in period was pure hell.  Since then, I’ve discovered companies that that specialize in wide width shoes, but it’s still a crapshoot buying them, because you have to buy them over the internet (the sneakers I have been buying this way have started giving me corns, so now it’s back to the drawing board). 

  

And then there’s the flatness of my feet.  I’m fairly convinced that I have no arches to speak of, so, of course, I have to wear special arch supports.  The beauty of these babies is that they’re made of plastic, so they tend to give you shin splints until you get used to them.  They also make it sound like you’re walking on ducks, they squeak so much.  To put it simply, footwear and I don’t get along.  I don’t even think the human leather shoes of Wai On Chan, Cheng Chow, and Chiang-Bang Mao’s Horrible High Heels (aka Ren Pi Guo Zheng Xie aka Bloody Shoe) would fit me any better than any others do.  It doesn’t help that I can’t walk for shit in high heels.

Lee Kang (Hung Fung) is the proprietor of a small shoe cobbling business.  He’s also a degenerate gambler of the lowest order, and, after getting knocked out during a row over his habit with young Sherry, he’s skinned alive by a masked lunatic (whose identity is obvious, even before you meet him without the mask).  Lee’s son Tien (Lam Chak-Ming) comes home from university with hoochie mama Wendy (Suen Tong), and he almost seems to give a rat’s ass about finding his missing father.  Wang, one of Sherry’s co-workers, finds a cheap source for fantastically soft leather (have you guessed yet who the murderer is?) and has some dealings with his nephew Ah-Nan (Siu Yuk-Lung), who works for triad boss Kuen (Shing Fui-On), a man very interested in the wholesale of women’s shoes.  Is that enough for you?

This film could have some interesting things to say, and it almost does.  For example, there’s the aspect of mad love going on.  Sherry pines for Tien (why is anyone’s guess, as the man is blanker than a sheet of copy paper and has fewer sides), and the entrance of Wendy makes her go a little crazy (there’s even a nice cat fight just to prove this).  Sherry goes to extreme lengths to get Tien, naturally, because he’s the man she deserves, and she was there first.  Wang pines for Sherry, and he also will go to extreme lengths to have her.  He even has a photo of her at home with her mouth cut out (you don’t have to wonder why; they make it excruciatingly clear in the movie).  I can’t imagine that being in any way satisfying, and I can only cringe at the abrasions one could incur with such a prop.  However, Sherry ultimately rejects Wang, which makes him go even crazier.  But just being in Wang’s presence is enough to infect Sherry with Wang’s insanity.  That she winds up as she does in the end stems not only from her commiseration with this guy but also (and more importantly) from her abuse at the hands of men in general.  Sherry is the embodiment of puppy love turned inside out and gone dark.  

Then, there’s the idea of “skin trades” (and not just in terms of animals, unless you count people as animals, which is fair play) and how fashion feeds into it.  Consumers and vendors love the human leather shoes.  Sherry and her fellow employees love working with the leather, and the money they make off their sales thrills them.  During the first human skinning, the killer exclaims, “I started my fortune with this leather.”  As in films such as Eating Raoul, this guy discovers discover that not only are people as easy to kill and use as animals are but they’re also cheaper and of a higher quality.  It’s just that this movie hasn’t a humorous bone in its body.    

Being a Category III film, Horrible High Heels does its level best to fulfill the promise of that rating.  It opens, for no narrative reason whatsoever, in a slaughterhouse, and we get to see cows being killed and cut up in graphic detail.  That’s about as subtle as this film gets.  There is plenty of rape for everyone, and this is combined with humiliation (as if rape, in and of itself, isn’t humiliating enough).  One victim is micturated on.  Another is stripped, beaten, made to walk on all fours like a dog, and forced to touch herself with amputated body parts.  This isn’t to say that the consensual sex scenes are any more pleasant.  They are as softcore as can be, leaving nothing to the imagination (well, a little), and they are just as skanky as any of the rape scenes.  They have a grimy aura to them, and the participants look dazed and sweaty.  Even when the characters want to be having sex, they still look like they couldn’t be further away.

The greatest fault of Horrible High Heels is that it’s incredibly scattershot to the point that you can completely believe that this thing was made by three directors, because it doesn’t follow any of its storylines coherently.  It also doesn’t really give a shit about what’s going on in any of them.  The human tanning angle is dropped halfway through the film.  The Ah-Nan/triad aspect doesn’t relate to the rest of the film except by the thinnest of threads.  The search for Lee that started this whole thing comes up only sporadically and with as much gusto as a nonagenarian’s exercise routine.  The characters change into completely different personalities at the drop of a hat.  The cops are completely subplot material until the end, when they suddenly become action heroes, just because (as does Tien in one of the more amusing sequences of the film).  With how salacious this movie is, it’s astounding how stultifying it manages to be.  If nothing else, its title at least delivers on two things: There are high heels in the film, and it’s horrible.

MVT:  The gutter-level sleaze.  Come on, you were watching this for some other reason?

Make or Break:  The opening scene in the abattoir may put some off their feed and spoil their libidos.  Then again, it may kickstart others’ engines.

Score:  3/10 

Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (1973)

What is it about decrepit structures in the middle of nowhere which attracts us so?  If I had to guess, I would venture there are three main reasons.  One, assuming no one is actually living there when you discover it, you can not only use it as a clubhouse but also as a demolition zone.  No one will care what you break, since no one’s there, and even if someone does own the property, they clearly don’t give a crap, or they wouldn’t have allowed it to fall into disrepair.  Please note, this is not me advocating for trespassing and perpetrating the destruction of personal property.  I’m merely trying to convey the mind set I believe is lured in by these sorts of locations.  

Two, they’re scary.  Even if you don’t believe in spooks and spectres, the interiors of some of these places are frightening.  Crumbling plaster, peeling wallpaper, rotting wooden fixtures, all combine into a very real nightmare realm you must dare yourself to enter (you’re not chicken, are you?).  This isn’t at all aided by the fact that the power is typically not in service, transforming every shadow into a black pool of evil, lying in waiting to engulf your soul.  

Third, you get to rummage through the remains of someone else’s life with impunity.  To my mind, this is what makes the second part so eerily effective.  After all, ghosts can’t exist where no one ever lived, right?  But here you have the detritus of someone’s innermost sanctum right in the palm of your hand.  Even if you don’t respect it, which you clearly don’t or you wouldn’t be in there in the first place, you cannot help but be aware of its presence.  And though you may have some of the most minute, personal details of a person’s life sprawled out in a waterlogged pile before you, the person himself/herself is still a mystery, still unknowable, because you’ve not walked in that person’s shoes.  You’ve trod on their floorboards, and that to me is the siren song of the abandoned building to an interloper’s ears.

Brunette Monica (Joëlle Coeur) and blonde Jackie (Gilda Arnacio) are just a couple of young women out strolling through the woods.  Coming upon a high wall, Monica goads Jackie into climbing it with her.  On the other side, they find an old, seemingly abandoned manse.  After walking around for a few more minutes, they head off to bed, where the two make love for a while.  Later that night, Monica still can’t sleep, so she wanders around the house, only to discover Fred (Willy Braque), a jewel thief who has holed up in the house with a good book for the evening.  Upon seeing Monica, though, he gets other ideas, and the two make love for a while.  Jackie discovers that Monica is no longer in bed and goes looking for her friend.  Discovering her and Fred together, Jackie decides to join in, and the three make love for a while (I trust the pattern is becoming clear).  Then Beatrice (Marie Hélène Règne) and her unctuous chauffeur (Francois Brincourt) show up, and things take something of a downturn.

I haven’t seen tons from Jean Rollin’s oeuvre, but I can say this with certainty: unless your sole motive in watching this movie is prurient, you can safely skip Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (aka Jeunes Filles Impudique, aka High School Hitch Hikers, and directed by Rollin  under the Michel Gentil nom de porn) in its entirety.  The first thirty-two minutes of the film comprise my above synopsis (out of which, about two minutes are story-related), and even then, I think I downplayed the sexual content.  Don’t misread this as an anti-porn sentiment, because it isn’t, and I also don’t believe that story and porn are necessarily at cross purposes in a film.  I’m saying they’re at cross purposes here.  And this is despite the fact that I find Ms. Coeur to be astonishing to look at, and am certainly not going to be the one protesting if she wants to take off her kit.  Still and all, don’t watch this film if you are interested in much more than being aroused.

This is not to say that there are no Rollin-esque touches.  From what I’ve read and seen, a great many of the director’s films are mostly plotless affairs, more concerned with atmospherics and visuals than with a cogent plot.  This is very much in evidence in this film, and there are also several instances of the signature Rollin shot of a woman advancing toward camera from afar, staring straight out at the audience but seemingly not all there in the head.  Direct Address is used at various points in the film, though the point here is little beyond titillation.  There are also some interesting settings with the “Chinese House” (basically a gazebo enclosed with stained glass windows) being the most visually intriguing.  The filmmaker chooses to shoot a key sex scene (which is sort of a misnomer, since it carries about as much weight as any of the other ones) using the colored panes as frames within frames with Fred and Monica on the inside and Beatrice on the outside looking in (at us).  Speaking of which, there are also several other shots used in the sex scenes where the action is either framed through a doorway or in a mirror’s reflection.  This brings me to the most compelling facet of this film.

If nothing else means much of anything in this film, it can absolutely be argued that it is an adult fairytale.  The girls are the young, not-so-innocent babes in the woods (they are innocent in terms of how freely they give their love, not in how experienced they are in negotiating the human body’s nethers).  Monica, in her red jacket is Red Riding Hood.  Jackie with her straw-colored hair and ability to sleep through almost anything is Goldilocks.  The pair enter a magical world by climbing over a barrier (this is also symbolized in the shots composed in reflections; they are through the proverbial looking glass), choosing to explore the unknown.  The house is that place where danger dwells, both Grandma’s house and the house of the Three Bears.  The jewel thieves are the wolves/bears who threaten the girls’ lives, physically and sexually, and this is where they will experience a couple of new ways of the flesh.  The Woodsman character should be the feckless Detective Harry (Pierre Julien), but with his assistant (Reine Thirion), they essentially become a form of Hansel and Gretel, with Beatrice the witch they are going to stuff into the proverbial oven.  

Nevertheless, with these fascinating elements in play, Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (a title I can only assume was slapped on the film to cash in on the likes of Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left, since there are neither schoolgirls nor hitchhiking of any variety to be found herein, though the two films do share one quality; they are both primitively made) is very much a missed opportunity.  The sex scenes feel like sex scenes in a porn and nothing more.  They are completely inorganic, and are intercut with many irrelevant, distracting cutaways (this is not to say they aren’t hot).  When the plot does choose to intrude, instead of being imbued with either a dreamlike, surreal quality or just a solid sense of storytelling, it also feels forced, with chunks completely elided, as if they couldn’t be bothered, since this is only porn, which ultimately begs the question, “why should I care?”  Why, indeed?            

MVT:  The sex is what the film is about, and if that’s what you’re interested in, you won’t go away disappointed.  Though if you want a movie that’s more than just a softcore porn, not so much. 

Make Or Break:  As I stated, over half an hour of the film’s opening consists of meandering and meat banging.  All well and good, but also a crystal clear indication of the circles of nothingness in which the film is going to travel.

Score:  3/10

Virgins From Hell (1987)

I’m just going to go ahead and admit something to you which you probably wouldn’t otherwise have guessed about me (maybe you would have, seeing as how the portrait I feel I’ve managed to paint of myself through these little, cinematic sojourns has been somewhat less than flattering).  I liked Information Society.  For those who don’t know, they are an electro-pop/synth-pop/etcetera group (from Minneapolis, which I would never have thought, personally) that formed in the Eighties (I have no idea if they’re still around).  They had one hit with their song What’s On Your Mind.  You may remember that one for its multiple sampling of Leonard Nimoy’s delivery of the line, “Pure energy” throughout the song.  I was so excited by this song, I wanted my hair done like singer Kurt Harland.  At the time, I kept my hair fairly short,  and if you’ve ever seen Harland’s mop, you know it is decidedly long and chaotic.  Well, I insisted to the lady who used to cut my hair that this was how I wanted my hair done, and I would brook no argument (yeah, I was a prick as a kid, too).  Being the extraordinarily good sport she was, she complied as best she could from the tiny reference photo on the cassette tape’s card stock foldout.  And I wound up with a very short, off-center Mohawk.  That lasted about three days, and then I decided to get my hair buzzed off yet again and stop fooling around with such lofty, follicular ideas (we’re not counting when I grew my hair out, since that was half a reaction to going bald and half laziness).  While this little venture wasn’t the worst thing I sank my claws into and clung to tenaciously, it sure as shit wasn’t the best, either.  But at the absolute minimum, I never wore any fashions that resembled something from Fred Flintstone’s wardrobe like the titular Virgins From Hell (aka Perawan Disarang Sindikat aka Maidens Revenge) of Ackyl Anwari’s film.  At least I don’t think I ever did.

A smoke-filled casino is busted up, some light genital mutilation ensues, and the movie gets underway.  Sheila (Enny Beatrice) and Karen (Yenny Farida), the Ann and Nancy Wilson of Indonesian girl bikers, have taken over an all-female gang in order to exact revenge.  Telling the girls her back story (and kicking off a flashback with, “It was a bright, sunny day…”), she details (we can only assume for about the tenth time) how Mr. Tiger (Dicky Zulkarnaen) liked their family’s house so much, he shot their parents to death and moved his illegal aphrodisiac operation into their unbelievably fortified and cavern-esque basement.  Describing more of the film would not only ruin the experience of seeing it for the first time, but you probably wouldn’t believe what I typed at any rate.

Let’s go over a bone I have to pick with this movie, or at least its title.  The female bikers are not virgins, or at the very least, the English-dubbed dialogue states that they’re not.  Sheila insists early on that, in order to infiltrate Tiger’s casino, she had to “become a common slut.”  We can only assume, then, that the other gang members had to do the same thing in order to accomplish their mission.  Later, two of the gang will turn against Sheila and the rest.  They become Tiger’s sex slaves and are regularly beaten and abused, but they never protest or make any attempt to escape or stop him.  Credit where it’s due, however, both Janet (another biker) and Sheila appear to castrate men trying to force themselves on  women, Janet with a knife, Sheila with a gun.  That the guard Janet cuts turns up minutes later, seemingly healed and ready for duty, is part of this film’s charm.  It would be nice to be able to say that the film carries the metaphor of chastity equaling power, but it really doesn’t.  If anything, it falls into a Rape-Revenge mode fairly early on, and even then, the women aren’t too strong without the help of men.  

Contrast this with the treatment of men and their sexuality in the film.  Mr. Tiger’s big scheme is to create an aphrodisiac that appears to put women into paroxysms of ecstasy for an extended period of time (think Spanish Fly on crack).  Of course, the single reason why this drug would exist at all (aside from Tiger’s declaration that, “With a drug like this, I can take over the worldwide aphrodisiac market “) is so that men can prey on women sexually and try to mollify their consciences (not that people who would do something like this would likely have one in the first place), because they (the victims) were “in the mood” to begin with.  It’s power over women that the film not only focuses on but also seems to endorse, despite some of its more suffragist proclamations.  

Mr. Tiger gives the term “sexual deviant” a bad name all by his lonesome.  He whips women, pulls their hair, drags them around, and he does it with a bug-eyed intensity that is truly startling.  This sense of sadism extends to the lesbian character of Dutch.  Her name alone is masculine, she is rough and tough like the men she serves and serves with, and she even has a tattoo of a scorpion on her face (I kept thinking of John Candy’s classic “Harry, The Guy With A Snake On His Face” skits from SCTV), further distancing herself physically from traditional feminine concepts of beauty.  Yet, Dutch also plays the part of another predatory male.  She comes upon the slumbering Karen and begins covering her in kisses.  When she gets to Karen’s thighs, though, she bites down and draws blood.  This hint of blood and cunnilingus intermingling conjures one of the film’s more skincrawling notions, but certainly not its wildest. 

If much of what I’m describing sounds just a bit insane, that’s because it is, but it has to be seen to be believed.  Every inch of this film reaches for (and usually hits) new plateaus of craziness.  A woman is hung by her wrists and spun around between four posts encased in barbed wire.  Another woman is turned on a spit over a barbecue pit (later she turns up, like the castrated guard, healed).  A crocodile is wrestled and slain like Johnny Weissmuller on a bad day.  A snake is used to extract a bullet from a wound.  Nonetheless, the levels of absurdity in this movie, no matter how far gone they may seem, are taken entirely in stride by the characters.  Nothing fazes these characters.  Nothing.  Furthermore, there is no audience identification character through whose eyes the viewers have a proxy to help them acclimatize.

It’s this banality of the preposterous that makes Virgins From Hell and many Indonesian genre pictures like it so incredibly fascinating.  Unlike with, say, a Terry Gilliam film, where there is often this same sort of facile acceptance of the outré (by the film, if not necessarily by its characters), the difference lies in the productions themselves.  Indonesian films don’t have the budgets to compete with the slickness of a Gilliam or Cronenberg film, so they have to rely solely on their imaginations which are (to their credit I would argue) not served by their executions.  It’s the audacity in putting everything on screen and then essentially shrugging at the audience as if it’s not their job to interpret any of this that makes them such unique cinematic experiences.  You may see the wires behind an Indonesian film’s tricks, but what they’re holding up will likely blow your mind.

MVT:  It’s the insanity.  It has to be.  If this were a standard Action/Sexploitation film (with not one nude scene, I might add), there would be nothing all that remarkable about it.  Its excessiveness is its allure, but it somehow doesn’t truly cross the line of distastefulness (though it’s certainly not a film made in good taste).

Make Or Break:  During a big battle between the Virgins and Tiger’s army, there is a single instance which stands out above the rest for me.  One of the women rides her motorcycle off a cliff, diving for the house’s front door.  As the bike wobbles on painfully visible wires toward its destination, a villain gets off a shot that causes the bike and its rider to explode.  It loses its impact just reading about it, but trust me; your jaw will hit the floor, and at that moment, you’ll be all in.

Score:  7/10