Project: Metalbeast

Project: Metalbeast aka Project: Metalbeast: DNA Overload (1995)

Dir: Alessandro De Gaetano

Written by Alessandro De Gaetano, Timothy E. Sabo, Roger Steinmann

Starring Kim Delaney, Barry Bostwick, John Marzilli, and Kane Hodder

Considering the movie is called... (checks notes) PROJECT: METALBEAST?!  oh dear god I've wasted my life! I could die tomorrow and they’d say at my funeral that I spent my last night on earth watching a movie called fucking PROJECT: METALBEST, sometimes officially subtitled PROJECT: METALBEAST: DNA OVERLOAD though I thank merciful Zeus that wasn’t the on-screen title of the version I saw, but still, Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with me, civilization is collapsing around us and my response is I intentionally select and watch the entirety of PROJECT: METALBEAST!? I live in an age of unprecedented access to the entire pantheon of human achievement! I have every word ever published by Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Hemingway and Hugo, Austen and Joyce at my beck and call! I could delve into the works of Confucius or Kant! I have access to depth and breadth of knowledge undreamt of by monarchs and conquerors a century before my birth! And what do I fucking do with my miserable life, ending, inexorably, second by irreplaceable second? PROJECT: fucking METABLEAST. [Spirals downward into existential despair]

Anyway, as I was saying, for a movie called PROJECT: METALBEAST, this starts off encouragingly, immediately introducing us to two tough-looking guys obviously on some kind of tough guy mission in the wilderness. For context, it provides the following on-screen text in that universally recognized “military typewriter font” which appears in movies and nowhere else in history:

·         Project: Operation Lycanthropus
·         Agency: US Military Intelligence
·         Destination: Carpathian Mountains, Hungary
·         Objective: Sample werewolf blood

That would be enough just by itself to let us know everything we need, but it goes on to add the extraneous:

·         Purpose: Create superior combat agent

As if "Sample werewolf blood" wasn't a sufficient purpose all on its own.

One of the two toughs is Butler (intense-looking enjoyable overactor John Marzilli [The Secret World Of Alex Mack, a 1984 episode of Cheers]) and the other we needn’t worry ourselves with, because he ain’t gonna be around for long. If the text is correct –and we will quickly find out that at least the werewolf part definitely is—they are in the Carpathian Mountains, where they speedily make their way to an obviously werewolf-infested structure and encounter an impressively swole werewolf (Kane Hodder!) who is summarily dispatched with silver bullets and has his blood sampled. So far so good, all according to plan! Oh, those bean-counters back in Washington might have rolled their eyes at spending millions of taxpayer dollars on Operation Lycanthropus. They might have said it was unwise, perhaps even asinine, to travel to the Carpathian Mountains, Hungary, to sample werewolf blood for the purpose of creating a superior combat agent! But who’s laughing now, you pencil-necked Liberal bureaucrats?!

All this is supposed to take place in 1975, by the way. Hard to believe Gerald Ford thought this was a good idea, but maybe it was one of those Nixon-approved schemes which took a few years to get off the ground.

Anyway, we got another PROMETHEUS situation here: nobody says holy shit, werewolves are real, this could revolutionize our entire understanding of biology, not to mention philosophy, the human soul, and mankind’s place in the universe. Instead, they’re just mad they can’t get their werewolf-juiced super-soldier, like, today. Butler, in particular, seems to think if they can’t have a lycanthropic Captain America up and running by brunch tomorrow, America is almost certainly going to be defeated by the forces of communist homosexual decadence. And so when the scientists tell him it’s going to take a day or two to run tests on the mysterious blood (which they don’t know is from a werewolf, a fact which might have hurried them along) Butler goes ballistic and injects himself with the remaining blood. This immediately results in him turning into a werewolf and going on a rampage. Which, of course it does, what the fuck did you think was going to happen, Butler? I mean, you personally took this blood from an actual, living breathing jacked-up ‘roided-out Carpathian werewolf! Always think, man, before you inject yourself with supernatural blood! Real rookie error in my opinion.

Fortunately Butler’s boss, the shifty Colonel who I briefly thought was named “Millie” but turns out to be named Miller (Barry Bostwick –yes, the Barry Bostwick! Beloved star of stage and screen Barry Bostwick from Spin City and what have you*), knows what’s up and quickly puts a couple silver bullets in Butler. I guess he must have seen this coming, or at least had some silver bullets handy for some other reason.

That’s a movie’s worth of werewolf plot right there, but it’s actually only 21 minutes and 30 second of screen time, kinda a complete little mini-movie to set the tone, like the opening of the 2009 FRIDAY THE 13th. We then skip ahead 20 years to the present (1995), where we learn that Miller has secretly stashed Butler’s nude silver-bullet-riddled corpse in a hidden lab, which --yes ladies-- means the villain from The Secret World Of Alex Mack goes full frontal, a nice little bonus for you. You see, Miller learned a valuable lesson from Operation Lycanthropus. Not, of course, that injecting psychotic Nixon-era special ops commandos with werewolf blood is an impractical idea. No, no, the theory is sound, obviously. The problem is that the resulting homicidal werewolf doesn’t have skin as hard as steel. That’s the real snag here. But wouldn’t you know it, in 1995 there’s a lab full of another group of government scientists who are looking for cadavers to practice skin grafts on. Only problem is, the process so far has resulted in all the grafts turning as hard as steel. Well that’s serendipitous! And so, Project: Metalbeast, as the new project is presumably unofficially known exclusively in the head of Colonel Miller, is born!

Unfortunately, as the movie re-starts with a new cast, the break-neck momentum of the first 20 minutes comes to a screeching halt, and we’re left to get introduced to a new generation of scientists led by Dr. Anna de Carlo (Kim Delaney – yeah, the NYPD Blue lady! Also she was in Brian de Palma’s MISSION TO MARS apparently, just five years after this?). Dr. de Carlo is going to be our new protagonist, but unfortunately will serve as something closer to the audience’s antagonist, because she is the one frustratingly factor standing between us and our promised METALBEAST. You see, she doesn’t trust Colonel Miller and doesn’t like that the handy cadaver he has provided for her project has incomplete paperwork. Now, she’s right, of course; the paperwork is bogus, and this guy is sketchy as hell, and in point of fact is trying to unleash a homicidal, vengeance-minded steel-skinned unkillable METALBEAST on them. But which would you rather watch, a movie about a homicidal, vengeance-minded steel-skinned unkillable METALBEAST wreaking havoc, or a movie about a low-level deep-state bureaucrat dragging their feet on a series of biology experiments through an intra-office dispute over incomplete paperwork? Because the movie bets it all on the latter. Not wisely, in my estimation.

See people, this is why everyone hates Liberals. Sure, they might be right, but crazy old uncle Trump, oops, I mean Miller, says we’re allowed to have fun and stay up late and eat all the candy we want and if we want to unleash a homicidal unkillable METALBEAST on the unsuspecting world, that’s our RIGHT as Americans goddamit. And hey, if some people end up dead, there’s always a tax cut to sooth the pain.

Anyway, this argument over proper paperwork for scientific specimens is just blatant anti-entertainment, made even worse by the movie’s general ability to be competent enough that it’s boring. The acting is fine, the production value is passable, the cinematography (by Thomas Callaway, FEAST and an impressive number of direct-to-video sequels including SLC PUNK 2,  CRUEL INTENTION 3 and CRITTERS 4) is adequate and even stylish on occasion.** The sound mix on the version I saw is absolute dogshit, thanks Amazon, but that’s more of an annoyance than a charming foible. So there’s not even anything to enjoy ironically as we slowly, inevitably drag ourselves through nearly 40 minutes before we get a METALBEAST up and running. The only thing that kept me going is the unspoken but unmissable sexual tension between Dr. de Carlo and Female Scientist #2 (Musetta Vander, wow, O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?, WILD WILD WEST, and MANSQUITO?! Plus music videos for Alice Cooper, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Chris Isaac and Tina Turner?!). Oh sure, de Carlo has a supposed love interest who looks like Michael Dudikoff but isn’t (Dean Scofield, a regular voice in the Metal Gear Solid games plus Don Coscarellli’s SURVIVAL QUEST and supporting the real Michael Dudikoff in BLACK THUNDER) but watch these women together. The little gestures, the lingering eye contact, the brief but significant touching. At one point, de Carlo kisses her co-worker lightly on the head after she comes up with some petty exposition. Don’t try and tell me that’s just being a friendly office mate, even in an office so close that you’d feel comfortable going into the meat locker and sadly caressing the corpse of a co-worker who has been hideously mauled by some kind of beast, possibly a METALBEAST, which also happens. This is chemistry. That guy who looks like Michael Dudikoff has no idea what he's in the middle of. None of this turns out to be important or interesting or even stated aloud, obviously, but it does provide a little color during a 40-minute stretch which really struggles to get much drama going.

See what I mean?

Also, I don't know where else to address this, but there's a minor subplot about how the wacky Latino chef (Mario Burgos, no other credits) in their surprisingly elaborate government kitchen (?) is going on strike until they sprinkle the place with holy water (??). There's even a line about how they tried to fool him by using regular water, but he caught on (???). This is never really a relevant plot point, but it comes up a couple times and I feel it must be vital to understanding the rich thematic tapestry that PROJECT: METALBEAST is weaving. 

Anyway, eventually we do get our METALBEAST, and it’s pretty rad, although I have to admit it doesn't quite turn out to be what I had in mind. I was imagining kind of a cyborg werewolf thing, and that’s not exactly what we get; remember, this is just a normal everyday run-of-the-mill werewolf covered in transplanted skin that for some totally valid scientific reason turns as hard as steel, so he’s not a robot or anything, just sort of a weird shiny werewolf who now has glowing red eyes (not sure how that happened) and bristly spines that make him look sort of like a were-porcupine (not sure how that happened, either). He doesn't look exactly like he's made of metal, though he does make metal sound effects when he walks, so there's that. But he looks pretty cool, and you get to see him a good bit. Perhaps recognizing his big namesake movie is really starting to sag, he immediately picks up where he left off back in 1975 and gets right down to the business of murdering everyone in sight. But there are apparently only four or five people who work here so it’s not exactly the wall-to-wall bloodbath that it would have to be to make it worth sitting through 40 minutes of departmental meetings about proper bureaucratic procedural protocol. Still, a METALBEAST was promised, a METALBEAST was delivered, and in fairness to them they have a pretty good plan to dispose of it: silver bullets aren’t going to make it through its MIGHTY METAL SKIN, so they melt down their boss’s antique silver coin collection which he keeps in the office (?) and mold themselves some silver-tipped bazooka rounds. That oughtta do it. With style.

A movie called PROJECT: METALBEAST could probably use a little more cheerful extravagance like that, but there’s enough here to make for a reasonably painless watch. At the very least, the movie is a timely warning about the dangers of injecting American soldiers with werewolf blood to create supersoliders, and then when they go berserk and murder everybody, freezing them nude in a secret lab for twenty years until the technology is developed to give them invulnerable metal skin. Frankly I’m a little peeved that my tax money went to pay for all that. Thankfully there are responsible, thoughtful citizens willing to speak out against this kind of shenanigan. And yes, I’m talking about the deep state: professional, honest civil servants who ensure that these kinds of excesses are kept in check the only way a huge organization is capable of controlling excess: through transparent, consistent protocol.

Yes sir, if we’re ever going to get saved, it’s not going to be by werewolf supersoldiers; it’s gonna be by honest technocrats making sure the paperwork is done right. And this review is a salute to them.

But that doesn’t mean I want to watch them work. If I’m going to throw precious hours of my life away watching low-budget Canadian garbage, I’d at least like to get more METALBEAST than tales of sensible governance, please.

PS: Also, for fucks sake, shouldn't there be a little metal on this soundtrack? I know the beast is literally metal, or at least as hard as metal and I get that PROJECT: THE BEAST WITH REALLY HARD SKIN doesn't have the same ring to it, but come on, you know what I expected with a title like that. Be a pal and throw some Dokken or something in there next time, guys.

*Also ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, but equally also WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S II, HANNAH MONTANA: THE MOVIE, IN THE HEAT OF PASSION II: UNFAITHFUL, THE SCORPION KING IV: QUEST FOR POWER, plus he had a voice role in the American dub of FANTASTIC PLANET and had guest roles on literally every American and Canadian TV series 1979-present.

** The score feels genuinely professional, boldly stating aloud that this is all much more exciting than it actually is, and occasionally almost able to convince you. Turns out it’s by a guy who would at least go on to be a genuine professional, one Conrad Pope, who did scores for PAVILION OF WOMEN, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, and TIM’S VERMEER, among with schlock like Billy Zane’s THE SET UP and the Alessandro De Gaetano-scripted NEOWOLF. But he’s better known as an orchestrator, a job he held on everything from THE CARE BEARS MOVIE to SCHINDLER’S LIST, the STAR WARS prequels, and most of the HARRY POTTER movies! Even VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS! Wow! What a meteoric rise!

Spring

Spring (2015)

Dir. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead

Written by Justin Benson

Starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker, Francesco Carnelutti

Any time an artist is coming off a big initial success, there’s always pressure for their next project to be the same, but bigger. This can be a tricky thing to pull off; a lot of time the talent that it takes to craft something intimate and small-scale doesn’t translate well into managing big budgets and bombast. And scaling up, even done right, does not always add up to greater impact, sometimes it can just be distancing and impersonal. But I’m happy to report here we have a rare success story: for their second full-length film (after a handful of shorts and their silly throwaway skateboarders-vs-skeletons segment of VHS VIRAL), co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead have managed to do something pretty impressive. They’ve scaled up their minimalist 2012 horror-tinged drama RESOLUTION in every way: longer, more locations, more horror, more special effects, more ambition. But they’ve kept the thing that made RESOLUTION so special completely intact: SPRING is, for all intents and purposes, a nuanced and surprising two-person relationship drama, interwoven with some slight but important strands of creature horror. It’s intimate, vividly observed, and full of sweet but unsentimental heart. And also there’s a weird monster. My kinda jam.

Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci, THUMBSUCKER, EVIL DEAD 2014) is on a bit of a downward spiral. His mom has just died. He’s working a thankless job as a cook, angry, frustrated, going nowhere. For no real reason he picks a fight with a violent local, and decides that maybe it would be a good idea to skip town for awhile. This turns out to be a good move, because he ends up in Apulia, Italy, which looks like something fairly akin to paradise. I’m betting this is one film production that didn’t mind getting a little behind schedule. Evan quickly meets up with some funny British assholes, but then immediately and correctly ditches them pretty much the moment he sets eyes on Louise (Nadia Hilker, German TV, two upcoming DIVERGENT movies, oh goody, that sounds like a good use of her talents), a beautiful and mysterious local woman who takes an interest in him. He takes an illegal under-the-table job at the idyllic orange farm of elderly Angelo (Francesco Carnelutti, oh Jesus, he was Heath Ledger’s mentor in THE ORDER?) who dispenses some advice and also subtly makes fun of him, but the focus is really on the intense, yet tentative, relationships between these two crazy kids.

The most interesting thing here is that you’d never exactly imagine these two would find a lot of common ground. Evan is brash, young, not especially well-cultured or educated. He’s not wealthy, not especially ambitious, you get the sense he’s been stuck in the insular working-class neighborhood he’s living in for most of his life, hasn’t seen much else. Louise, on the other hand, is enigmatic, brilliant, worldly, a scholar; the kind of person who goes to a museum with you and can lecture on the exhibits without reading the sign and still not sound condescending, because her joy about the subject is so readily apparent. They have almost nothing in common... but you gotta admit, there is something there, some kind of funny spark between them. Evan may not be as educated as she is, but he’s no idiot either, he can keep up with her, not be intimidated by her. He doesn’t have a wealth of knowledge about Roman statuary, but he can follow along enough to surprise her and make her laugh.

Is this what that Love, Italian Style book was about? Because the cover does not make that clear.

She’s sort of charmed by his tenacity, but doesn’t think there’s much of a future for the two of them. And it’s hard to argue with her, because she really seems like she’s working on a different level than he is. I actually assumed Hilker was quite a bit older than Pucci -- turns out she’s actually three years younger. There’s a startling maturity and enigmatic wisdom to her performance which gives the impression of a lot of life experience; Evan, impulsive and full of conviction, seems goofy and naive in comparison. He uses a bunch of cheeseball lines that make her roll her eyes, but she also finds sort of endearing.The movie doesn’t dislike him because he’s young and corny, though -- of course he’s like that, why would he know anything? But he’s a real nice guy, and he’s sincerely doing the best that he can. At his wisest, he simply knows when it’s time to shut up. There’s a terrific scene where Evan and his ancient employer are relaxing after a day’s work, and the older man starts quietly reminiscing about his dead wife. Evan, ever the quintessential American, starts to give him a pep talk, and then suddenly stops. What does a 20-something kid have to teach an old man about love? Nothing. And the moment he realizes that, he just shuts his mouth and the two of them watch the sun set in silence. It’s a beautiful moment which simultaneously tells us something rather powerful about both characters and sets up the film’s central conflict.

See, there’s a reason Louise feels so much more worldly than Evan does; she’s had a pretty unusual life. She’s a woman of many secrets, and one of them is that she’s actually some sort of crazy Lovecraftian monster. You’d think this would be a spoiler, a big reveal at the end of the film which explains her mysterious behavior and sets up a tragic impossible love between them. But to Benson and Moorehead’s eternal credit, Evan realizes what’s going on by the halfway point. So we learn the truth not in a twist, but as just another wrinkle in this budding relationship. And then the conflict really does come down to the wisdom of their being together. Evan, idealistic, youthful, thinks they can make it work. Louise, ancient, tragic, worldly, thinks it’s impossible, maybe doesn’t even want the compromise of having a serious relationship at all. He’s got to convince her that just this once, youthful passion really is a better bet than hard-earned wisdom. Pucci really shines here; he’s ridiculously outmatched by her in every imaginable way, but somehow his uncomplicated resoluteness in the face of all logic makes him seem more of an equal to her than he should be. But an equal partner? She’s not sure. And she’s gonna have to decide relatively quickly, or risk some monstrous consequences.

Part of her ambivalence is that Louise is unusually self-assured and self-actualized both as a female romantic lead and as a silver screen monster. Both these roles so often get bogged down in guilt and loneliness and helplessness and plain need, and our male lead is tasked with saving the day, either by giving a romantic partner something she was lacking or by stopping a monster through violence. Here, neither is necessary; Louise is doing quite well on her own, thank you very much, she doesn’t have any need for some young American hero to fix her life, either romantically or by heroically curing (or destroying) her monster side. In fact, IMDB claims Benson wrote SPRING “as a counterpoint to Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles in that it is about a creature who actually enjoys its strange condition.”* Most screen monsters, starting at least with Henry Hull’s 1935 WEREWOLF OF LONDON, have been psychological symbols of repression and guilt; they strive to be human, but they have an uncontrollable monstrous side which they try to hide and control. Louise, infinitely older and more comfortable in her own skin, finds being a Lovecraftian horror to be inconvenient sometimes, but it’s more a symbol of her confidence and power than a symbol of her shame. She likes it, and probably wouldn’t give it up even if there was a cure for being a were-squid. She’s on the right track, baby, she was born this way. So what can Evan offer her that she doesn’t already have? Well, only one thing -- the kind of long-term emotional intimacy which her current life doesn’t afford much of. It’s fun to be an immortal, ultra-powered being, but she has to admit it can be a little isolating. She’s got to decide if that’s something worth giving up a part of herself to pursue, and she feels genuinely conflicted about it, even as she can hardly believe she’s pondering such a ridiculous thing.

There is something of a conflict here, but mostly the movie isn’t about tension or even mystery, it’s a strange, philosophical romantic comedy by way of a creature feature. Most of the movie is just our two leads, wandering somewhere obscenely beautiful and chit-chatting, trying to get a laugh. The most obvious comparison is Linklater’s BEFORE SUNRISE, more than DIE MONSTER DIE. The two young lovers feel each other out, push each other apart, reconcile, discover some surprises (admittedly, her surprises are probably more surprising than his, but still). It’s sweet and romantic, but not in a corny Hollywood way. You just really want these two crazy kids to end up together. Sure, she’s an ageless, cannibalistic Lovecraftian horror, but come on, no one’s perfect. She’s also a real cool, surprisingly vulnerable lady. Let’s not pigeonhole her just because of the tentacles and shit.

Still beats a creepy dwarf in a red raincoat.

Gradually, out of the pleasing and bracingly authentic little moments between them, something legitimately philosophical emerges. Louise has a much longer history to draw on than Evan does, and, besides, she’s a biologist and academic. She loves a good roll in the hay as much as anyone, and appreciates the companionship of her dorky young consort, but she fundamentally sees love as a chemical process, a biological function which history and culture have tried to gussy up in fancy words. Having a bit of a compulsive monstrous side herself, she knows how irresistibly compelling biology can be, how easy it is for the body to override the brain, which then scrambles to try to justify itself. The brain wants to turn love into something romantic and ethereal, but of course it’s just a pretty frame around a primal, animalistic urge. Why pretend otherwise? Evan is more of an idealist, he thinks there’s something more to it than that, even if he can’t really articulate what that is or exactly what it means, other than they should be together, dammit, it just feels right. Who’s right? Well, she is, obviously, and they both kind of know it. But maybe it doesn’t matter? Or maybe at least they can pretend it doesn’t?

I would just like to point out that this is my favorite tagline from the whole Chainsawnukah 2015

Nothing is spelled out for you, exactly, but come on, when was the last time you saw a love story on-screen that actually had something to say about the concept? Love as an abstract notion in our society has had the meaning all but ground out of it. I mean, walk through whatever banal, disspiriting public place you can imagine, and odds are there’s a tinny, distant store radio croaking out top ten hits from a few years back. Count the number of times you hear the word love. By the time you buy your snack-sized caramel Bugles, your deodorant and your scratch-off lotto tickets, the word “love” will have been that much more watered down and worthless. SPRING uses its surreal monster premise as a way to subtly probe the concept, to rattle the formula a little and see if it can’t shake off some rust. As a result, it achieves a much more vivid and approachable love story, as our two characters grapple both with the nebulous concept of love itself, and their impossible-to-ignore compulsion towards each other with all the tricky biological and psychological strings that entails.

On the wall of Louise’s apartment, there’s an interesting framed print which would not be familiar to most people. It is to me, though. I can’t get a screencap of the movie, but have a look:

This bizarre sequence is actually two pages of the Codex Seraphinianus, a rather mysterious book, written in an unknown language, which seems to depict through images a strange and unfamiliar world. It was published by an Italian artist and industrial designer in 1981, so its origins are modern, but its closest literary antecedent is something considerably more mysterious, the so-called Voynich Manuscript, a 15th-century work of unknown origin which is similarly written in an unknown language and features strange and unearthly flora and fauna. This is a significant image to Louise, then, for two reasons. The first is the more obvious one, it speaks to her transitional status between human and creature, and even anticipates the sexual element which is an integral part of that transformation. But the second has more to do with the text itself. The Codex Seraphinianus is a modern artifact, but it’s intentionally designed to be unknowable, and with its connection to the Voynich Manuscript, it intentionally evokes the unknowably ancient past.

That, of course, is where Louise has come from. She’s a thoroughly modern woman, plenty capable of living and succeeding in modern life, but she’s also inexorably linked to an ancient past, to experiences and wisdom no modern human would be able to relate to. There’s something inherently primordial about her, something like the Spring itself, which is both intimate and elusive, powerful and compelling in a way which goes beyond the superficial trappings of modernity. Ain’t that love for ya? Bizarre, incomprehensible, compelling, gross, beautiful, with one foot thoroughly in the modern world and one reaching back into timeless antiquity. SPRING invites us to imagine how strange and marvelous it is that this works at all, and how confusing and frustrating it can all be -- but also how much fun it can be to take the journey anyway. It may be an intimate story, but ambitions don’t get a lot bigger than that. Benson and Moorehead are slated to take on a biopic of Aleister Crowley as their next film (!?), a project which promise to be somewhat more sweeping in scope. But movies which balance the vast with the vitally personal as gracefully as this one does are rare enough that I find SPRING a very big deal indeed.

* Reading through a couple interviews with the two, they do reference Rice quite a bit, but it seems like they saw those books more as an inspiration than a rival. They talk more about how they wanted to create a character even older than the 500-year-old vampires, a character that has seen entire civilizations and ways of life come and go. Benson does note in one interview that Louise, “would probably make fun of Anne Rice’s vampires as a bunch of emo bitches. (laughs)”

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: On a long enough timeline... every girl gets weird.
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: No
• REMAKE: No
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: Shot it Italy, but by an American crew
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No. Check out the sweet-ass drone overhead shots, though. Fuckin' fly as hell.
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Pucci is working his way there.
• BOOBIES: Yes
• MULLETS: None
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: None
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: Yup, a couple of very nifty designs that I want you to see, and intentionally avoided screenshots of.
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No, the Italian milieu notwithstanding.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: No.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No.
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Woman into various creatures.
• VOYEURISM: Nah
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Fairly high, I didn't even realize it was out til a buddy got it in from Netflix.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Lovecraft stories should be a lot sexier than he seemed to think they were.
• TITLE ACCURACY: It works on a metaphorical level.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

Hard Rock Zombies

Hard Rock Zombies (1985)

Dir Krishna Shah

Written by David Allan Ball, Krishna Shah

Starring E. J. Curse, Sam Mann, Jennifer Coe, Lisa Toothman, Phil Fondacaro

So, in this one, there’s an unnamed everyband of groupie-banging outlaw “Hard Rock” musicians, and they go to the tiny town of Grand Guignol, Canada, because it is the only place where a big studio mogul will come to hear them play and subsequently hand over wheelbarrows full of money, hot tubs full of groupies, and learjets full of lawyers to restore the correct balance of the universe. Problem is, they didn’t really think through this plan very well because despite having a state-of-the-art 5,000-seater rock venue, the townsfolks of Grand Guignol oppose rock and roll and have recently passed an ordinance banning it, resulting in a tense confrontation with the local rednecks and cops (unlike BLACK ROSES, this time there's no evidence that the townsfolk were right to do it, this "hard rock" band is about as benign as you can get). 

You’d think that would be the worst news, but wouldn’t you know it, a nubile hard rock blonde (Lisa Toothman, WITCHCRAFT III: KISS OF DEATH) has been luring men to skinnydip with her in a fetid pond outside Norman Bates’ house in a totally not at all suspicious manner, but I'll be damned if the minute they’re nude some maniac doesn't chop them up while two mutant dwarfs watch and a creep in a white suit takes photos from the bushes. So despite the pleas from a virginal groupie named Cassandra (Jennifer Coe, “teenage girl” in one episode of TV’s Falcon Crest, nothing else) when our intrepid heroes see a hot blonde hitchhiker, they can’t resist spending the night at her gothic palatial manor and meeting her parents (or roommates? it’s a little unclear) who turn out to be quite a colorful lot that give the TEXAS CHAINSAW family a run for its money in the eccentric relatives department. Blondie is the only one who’s not a monster, werewolf, mutant, peeping tom, or (widely known spoiler) elderly pervert Hitler,* so it’s actually kind of sweet that she’s not embarrassed by her wacky relatives and happily introduces everyone she meets to the whole fam-dambly. But as often happens in this sort of situation, cultures collide and the band ends up getting killed, only to be resurrected by a taped magical incantation the bass player had been messing around with. You’d think this would result in some revenge (and it briefly does), but actually the band returns with only one thing on its zombie mind, which is to play the hardest god damn rock show ever experienced by a single old man sitting alone in the audience.

Now I’ve seen plenty of heroically misguided movies, but come on, there’s no way that plot was written with the sincere belief that this would be good. This is nakedly a deliberate attempt to produce a wacky cult movie, and they pull out all the stops in terms of content and quality to produce something campy and ridiculous. This is a risky strategy generally; there’s no shortage of hilariously terrible movies which were earnestly trying to be good, so an equally low-rent movie which is actively trying to be dumb feels a little dishonest and its absurdity doesn’t carry as much goodwill. I think ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW is probably the only example of this impulse which mostly works, and even that is carried mostly on the shoulders of some pretty good songs, which HARD ROCK ZOMBIES definitively lacks. But you gotta at least respect the amount of overkill that went into making this one offbeat. Any one of the fifty or so ridiculous gimmicks here would be more than enough to hang an entire movie on, but HARD ROCK ZOMBIES just keeps tossing more on the pile. What it lacks in earnestness it makes up for in eagerness, which is not quite as rewarding but still enough to get by.

The movie has a pretty bizarre structure, wherein our lovable band of “hard rock” troubadours are introduced as the main characters, but get offed by the 1/ 3 point, get their revenge at the halfway mark (both in the form of musical montages) and then things get a little directionless as the movie casts about for any remaining characters to guide us to the finale. The resurrected zombies don’t have much personality other than their shuffling moaning and supposed hard rocking, so the movie somewhat halfheartedly tries to pretend anyone might care about their dorky manager and the ignorant townsfolk, which needless to say we do not. It tries to compensate with some goofy, tangential vignettes --constant cutaways to a rubber dwarf who eats himself, an unnecessarily protracted sequence where townsfolk try to avoid rampaging zombies by making giant cardboard heads for themselves-- but even so, there’s still some dead space to fill with random nothing (there’s a lot of unrelated footage of a blonde chick Whitesnake-dancing peppered in-between minor events).

That might be because HARD ROCK ZOMBIES did not actually begin life as a real movie, even one with aspirations as low as we see here. It was supposed to be a movie-within-a-movie in director Krishna Shah’s other 1985 movie AMERICAN DRIVE-IN (which shares a good portion of this cast). Shah, an Indian-born entrepreneurial jack-of-all-trades (everything from producing Broadway shows to being CEO of Double Helix Films) apparently decided somewhere along the way to just invest the minimal amount of money necessary to expand the 20-minute joke film to a full-length extravaganza, thereby essentially producing two feature films for the price of one. This crafty business move resulted in a side project which is now certainly the more beloved of the two movies, if any film which doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page can be realistically described as beloved (Update: Good news, looks like as of 2018, HARD ROCK ZOMBIES has finally made the big times!). Of course, when you stretch out a in-movie joke to a full 98 minutes, the material can get a little thin (see: GRINDHOUSE and all its ancillary products except the brilliant HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN), resulting in the scattershot sketch-comedy approach which lards up the second half of this Frankenstein's movie just when it ought to be gaining momentum. But it hustles pretty hard all the way through; it may be somewhat haphazardly assembled, but at least it’s seldom uneventful.

Anyway, if you would be interested in seeing a campy zombie pastiche where they reverse-Auschwitz zombie Hitler as a hilarious joke, this one will probably provide the experience you've been craving. It’s maybe not quite as hilarious or subversive as it wants to be --it’s probably funnier to describe than it is to actually watch-- but it does have some legitimate chuckles in there, more than enough to nestle it comfortably in the company of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, RETURN OF CAPTAIN INVINCIBLE, NOT OF THIS EARTH (1988) or something. You know, movies which are not exactly good, or even successful on their own terms, but still have a certain scrappy personality which makes them at least intermittently watchable. If it falls short of the not-especially-lofty standards of ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, however, it does so wholly as a result of its songs. It’s a musical through and through (in fact, most of the major events in the film are communicated through the form of montage music videos) but Jesus, this barely even qualifies as rock, let alone hard rock. There’s a vaguely metal final number which at least hangs its aspirations on a crunchy rock riff, but mostly the keyboards have an iron grip on these tracks which place them definitively in the wuss-rock category. These guys may need to call themselves hard rock zombies to register as rebellious enough for naive teenagers in tiny midwestern towns to want to bang, but I know a song that could feasibly be covered by Air Supply when I hear it. They got a few energetic rockabilly numbers, but Hard Rock? You want to look into Slash’s sunglasses and tell him you’re in the same subgenre as him? Slash isn’t going to accept that shit, and you know it. Plus, consider the following:

That is not acceptable behavior even in a montage context. Your hard rock card has been revoked.

Anyway, aside from the disspiriting lack of hard rock, this one’s got everything. Zombies. Mullets. Whitesnake dancing. Cannibalistic muppets. A dwarf with an eyepatch.** Giant cardboard heads of famous celebrities. Sex-pervert Hitler. Zombie Hitler. Nudity. A goofy parody of PSYCHO. Werewolf Eva Braun. Decapitating. Zany Antics. A town hall meeting. And many, many musical montages. This would probably have been better if it had slightly more aspiration to be a real movie, but at least you can’t accuse it of lack of effort. It’s definitely aiming to please, it just might be trying a little too hard.

*By the way, actor Jack Bliesener has only two credited roles: Hitler, and “the President of the United States” (in the Greeksploitation crime thriller ZEUS THE CRIME KILLER). Talk about range!

**Give credit to by far the most distinguished member of the cast, dwarf actor Phil Fondacaro, who was an Ewok, a Garbage Pail Kid, a PHANTASM dwarf, a Willow, “Chihuahua” in LAND OF THE DEAD, dwarf Dracula in THE CREEPS, and the troll from TROLL. This guy’s a fuckin’ national treasure. His IMDB entry notes that he is the shortest Dracula ever on film, a full three feet short of Christopher Lee (who it claims is the tallest Dracula). Plus, he and I share a birthday. I’m now a fan for life.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• TAGLINE: They came back from the grave to rock and rave and misbehave! and Their Farewell Concert is to Die For! AND, Your Can't Keep a Good Band Down! They're not a good band so I don't know what that last one means, but still, all quality efforts.
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Nope, sorry to disappoint.
• SEQUEL: None, amazingly
• REMAKE: None, amazingly
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: USA
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Ha
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Phil Fondacaro
• BOOBIES: Yes
• MULLETS: Oh God, yes
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: The drummer is murdered while having consensual shower kissing, probably doesn't count. Then, the townsfolk want to fix everything by forcing our virginal groupie hero to have sex with all the zombies. Fortunately that doesn't come to pass.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Head ripped off (by zombie Hitler!) hand cut off, revived.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: Yeah, some sort of weird muppet or something, also werewolf.
• THE UNDEAD: Zombies! (both hard rock and generic varieties)
• POSSESSION: No.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Yeah, the murderous Hitler family.
• EVIL CULT: No, although a chant from the middle ages revives the zombies.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Humans into Zombies, Eva Braun into Werewolf.
• VOYEURISM: Yes, pervy camera guy photographs the murders from the bushes or through a window.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: So high it doesn't even have its own wikipedia page.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: If you're going to bill yourself as "hard rock" you better be damn sure I'll consider your shit hard. Otherwise, no amount of zombie Hitlers and flesh-eating muppets is ever going to be enough to entirely forgive you.
• TITLE ACCURACY: In the words of Dan P, "more like Wuss Rock Ghouls."
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.