Posted in: No Huddle Reviews by J C on October 5th, 2015
“My name is Clay Marshall, and I am one of the many survivors of the zombie apocalypse.”
Yes, you read that right. The word “many” in the above quote is not a misprint. A Plague So Pleasant seeks to explore the crushingly mundane aftermath of a worldwide plague. Unfortunately, the movie appears to be of two minds in terms of presenting its skewed view of the zombie apocalypse. The result is an intriguing, uneven film that doesn't fully come together.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 13th, 2009
Try this plot on for size: Gordo, an ape owned by carnival sideshow barker the Great Lampini (Paul Richichi), gets loose and rampages about Long Island, raping and killing and stealing cars (!). Meanwhile, the moronic detective in charge of the murder case dismisses the idea that an ape is the culprit, and casts his racist eye on the unfortunate Duane Jones (Christopher Hoskins, whose character is named after Night of the Living Dead's lead).
Though made in 1997, this shot-on-super-8 effort does its level best to come across as the Lost 70s Grindhouse Flick, and it has to be said that it does a pretty credible job in capturing that trash aesthetic. There is also wit on display, most prominently in Lampini's deliberately overwrought and baroque dialogue. The film does, though, take its time getting to the rampage: nearly half its 77-minute running time has elapsed before the attacks begin. That first thirty minutes consists largely of people arguing, which has varying entertainment value. The gore scenes have a charming DIY feel, but there is a nastiness to the attacks on women that, as with Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69 (director/co-writer Keith Crocker's other recently released effort), is in some ways more off-putting than those of its inspirations, given how much of the rest of the film works as a goofy comedy.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 12th, 2009
The sleaze of the grindhouse era inspires a special kind of love. Warped, dubious, indefensible, yet real all the same. Part of that love is a nostalgia from those bad old days. But it takes an even more special brand of that special love to seek to recreate forgotten exploitation genres, and yet that is what we have here: the first Nazisploitation flick in close to thirty years.
With Nazi hunters closing in, former SS commandant Helmut Schultz recounts to a priest his activities as the ruler of Stalag 69. In the closing days of the war, he performs terrible scientific experiments, along with the expected torture, on an international (and co-ed) group of POWs. Said prisoners, meanwhile, plot their escape and their revenge.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on January 11th, 2008
Arthur Kennedy and wife Teresa Wright are an older childless couple who discover a young man (Tom Happer) living in the crawlspace of their basement. Though they are initially alarmed, he seems harmless, and they take him under their wing. What seems to be a nice, if bizarre, solution for everyone becomes tense when Happer, tormented by locals, shows a potential for great violence.
This release from Wild Eye in their TV Movie Terror Collection is a much stronger entry than The Devil’s Daughter. Rather than highlight the limitations of television when it comes to horror, the film plays to the medium’s strengths. The tone is low-key and character-driven, and off-kilter in just the right sort of way to generate a nice current of unease. Happer is a disturbing figure, but he’s also sympathetic, much in the same vein as the Frankenstein monster.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on December 6th, 2007
Come with me, gentle viewer, back to the state of horror on TV, Anno Domini 1973. After her long-absent mother dies in mysterious circumstances, Belinda Montgomery attends the funeral where she meets Shelley Winters, an old friend of the family, or so she claims. Winters takes Montgomery into her home, and there our young heroine meets all sorts of strange people, and gradually realizes she is in the clutches of a Satanic cult who believe she is Satan’s daughter.
Televised horror has made great strides since this Movie-of-the-Week era, though even the likes of Masters of Horror still has to work, on its best days, to reach the level of a decent theatrical release. But The Devil’s Daughter is eye-witness to an era where mediocrity was, with very rare exceptions, the best one could hope for. Awful as it is, this pick is awful in entertaining ways. So here we have Shelley Winters teasing us with the promise that she might not take the volume to 11, and then spectacularly breaking that promise; Abe Vigoda channelling the spirit of Boris Karloff; Jonathan Frid stuck with a mute character of unclear motivations; Montgomery’s character portrayed as such an incurious wallflower (she’s only mildly interested in the Rather Big Clue that is the portrait of a cloven-hoofed Satan hanging over Winters’ fireplace) that sympathy is very difficult to muster; Robert Foxworth showing up late in the day as a plot device only the dullest of viewers will fail to see coming; Joseph Cotten doing ditto; and such treasures as a photo album complete with a picture of all the Satanists, in full black regalia, happily posing for a group shot. In other words, the camp comes thick and fast, and that kind of entertainment value is what accounts for this terrible movie’s star rating.
