Originally posted on 5/14/2015
Jess Franco's immediate follow-up to his relatively well-made VAMPYROS LESBOS is another dark, death-shrouded vehicle for the lovely and exotic Soledad Miranda (again billed as "Susann Korda") featuring some of the same castmembers including Paul Müller, Ewa Strömberg, and Franco himself.
The result, SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY (1971), is a slasher/revenge thriller which stands with his previous effort as one of my two favorite Franco films so far.
The storyline this time is lean and simple--genetic research scientist Dr. Johnson (Fred Williams) commits suicide after his maverick work with human embryos is viciously derided as inhumane by his peers, who suggest he be not only imprisoned but even executed for such atrocious ideas.
Originally posted on 5/14/2015
So far, I've seen five films by cult director Jesús "Jess" Franco, including THE HOT NIGHTS OF LINDA, THE SINISTER EYES OF DR. ORLOFF, BLOODY MOON, and PAULA-PAULA. Not enough to call myself an expert on the prolific filmmaker, but enough to conclude that I'll probably never become a devoted Francophile since I find little of his work particularly compelling unto itself.
That said, I do find most of it fun to watch even if it's often in a "so bad it's good" kind of way. My fifth Franco film, VAMPYROS LESBOS (1971), is the best one I've seen so far and definitely worth watching, although I wouldn't call it a must-see unless you're already a fan.
This sun-blanched, 70s-tacky vampire yarn is like a distaff version of "Dracula", with Ewa Stroemberg (SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY) as Linda and Soledad Miranda (here billed as "Susann Korda") as Countess Nadine Carody filling in for Jonathan Harker and Count Dracula. Linda arrives at the Countess' sunny island in Istanbul to help expedite a legal matter--namely, the inheritance by Nadine of the late Count Dracula's estate--and ends up mired in a nightmarish lesbian affair with the undead beauty in which she unwillingly supplies both emotional and physical sustenance, i.e. blood.
If you're a genre fan, chances are...
...you already have a warm spot in your heart for the wonderful Beverly Garland.
And her amazing performance in "It Conquered the World" (1956) is just one of the many reasons why.
Video by Porfle Popnecker. I neither own nor claim any rights over this material. Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!
Originally posted on 7/26/18
For those with a taste for the unusual, SUFFERING OF NINKO (2016) should prove a delectable, perhaps even sumptous treat. While hardly the nuttiest Asian supernatural film set in ancient Japan that I've ever seen, it easily ranks as one of my more keenly unusual movie-watching experiences.
The establishing shots alone let us know that we're in for a beautifully rendered film by first time feature director (and writer and producer and editor) Norihiro Niwatsukino, whose credits on the project mark it as an intensely personal vision.
Set in Japan's Edo period (around the 16th century or so), the story begins in a monastery where young monk Ninko (Masato Tsujioka) is the most ardent and hardworking of all his peers. But for all his virtue and spiritual purity, he suffers from a terrible burden--he is incredibly, insanely irresistible to every woman he comes into contact with.
Originally posted on 11/27/18
A quick, down and dirty shoot (as described by the filmmakers) on a very low budget sometimes yields surprisingly good results, as it has in the case of the horror-thriller MADE ME DO IT (Indican Pictures, 2017).
What director and co-writer (with Matthew John Koppin) Benjamin Ironside Koppin set out to do was to get some talented people together and "Frankenstein" (his word) a movie together taking the old FRIDAY THE 13TH and HALLOWEEN slasher templates and doing an homage with a few curves and angles thrown in.
The main victims aren't the usual rowdy, party-hardy bunch--just pensive college student Ali Hooper (Anna B. Shaffer), her younger brother Nick (Jason Gregory London), and her boyfriend Jason (Liston Spence).
Originally posted on 1/19/2011
When the Warner Brothers animation department was at its peak in the 40s and 50s, they consistently churned out some of the best and funniest cartoons ever made. One of their most memorable comedy teams was the cute little bird Tweety and the always-hungry cat Sylvester, whose catchphrases ("I taught I taw a putty tat!" and "Sufferin' succotash!") are part of cartoon history. With Warner Home Entertainment's LOONEY TUNES SUPER STARS: TWEETY & SYLVESTER, fifteen of their classic shorts have been collected on DVD--some uproariously funny, others not quite hitting the bullseye.
The team, who had already appeared individually in several Warner Brothers shorts, scored an Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) with their first pairing, 1947's "Tweetie Pie" (sic). This initial outing, in which homeless Tweety is taken in by a household whose cat sees the tiny bird as a mouth-watering meal, seems to be an answer to MGM's Tom and Jerry. The cat who would later be known as "Sylvester" is referred to here as "Thomas" just like the MGM character, and is similarly harangued by a generic housewife seen only from the waist down.
With Tweety's cage suspended from the ceiling, he sits in his swing warbling a strange little tune ("I love little putty, his throat is so warm...And if I don't hurt him, he'll do me no harm"). Meanwhile, Sylvester devises a series of ingenious methods of attaining his prey, giving the writers a chance to come up with some pretty funny material while establishing the basic formula for the series. Sylvester causes more and more chaos and destruction with each attempt, either by his own ineptitude or the playful deviousness of the little bird.
Next comes "Bad Ol' Putty Tat" (1949), the classic situation in which a cartoon cat lays siege to a bird perched high up in a birdhouse, and "All Abir-r-r-d!" (1950), with similar antics taking place in the baggage compartment of a passenger train. These initial offerings are mid-level Warner Brothers stuff, well-drawn and animated but not all that outstanding.
With "Canary Row" (1950), the characters have come into their own and the gags are snappy and clever. "Friz" Freleng's direction also gets progressively sharper and more inventive. As always, musical maestro Carl Stallings' score plays a major part in making the action a lot funnier as Sylvester tries to sneak into a hotel to get Tweetie. Thanks to voiceover legend Mel Blanc, we hear the cat speak for the first time as he impersonates a bellboy: "Your bagth...madame?"
Blanc's speeded-up voice is charmingly funny as Tweety sings his theme song over the titles:
"I'm a sweet little bird in a gilded cage
Tweety's my name but I don't know my age
I don't have to worry and that is that
I'm safe in here from that old putty tat."
Tweety's kindly old protector, Granny (first voiced by Bea Benederet, later by June Foray), makes her first appearance as well, thus rounding out the cast and giving the series a more distinctive character. Thankfully for us cat lovers, it's not as painful seeing Granny whack Sylvester with her umbrella as some faceless harridan beating him with a broom.
1951's "Putty Tat Trouble" opens with Tweety shoveling snow out of his nest ("This is what I get for dweaming of a white Chwistmas!") and catching the attention of two housecats, Sylvester and a roughhousing rival, who go at it tooth and nail over the tiny bird. This is the first real laugh riot of the collection and had me guffawing out loud several times. (Look for the cardboard box with the words "Friz--America's Favorite Gelatin Dessert", a self-reference by director "Friz" Freleng.)
The all-out hilarity continues in "Room and Bird" (1951), with both Granny and Sylvester's owner sneaking their pets into a "No Pets Allowed" hotel where they're joined in mischief by a belligerent bulldog, causing the house detective a huge headache. "Tweety's S.O.S." (1951), in which Sylvester spots Tweety through the porthole of his cabin on board a docked ship, gives the cat another rare early line of dialogue: "Hell-o, breakfast!" Later, when Granny catches him and he puts on an innocent act, Tweety exclaims "Ooh, what a hypocwite!"
"Tweet Tweet Tweety" (1951) takes place in a national forest with Sylvester trying to cut down the tree in which Tweety's nest is perched. We hear his catchphrase "Sufferin' succotash!" for the first time here as he grows increasingly more talkative. "Gift Wrapped" (1952) is an amusing Christmas-themed story.
In "Ain't She Tweet" (1952), a pet store delivers Tweety to Granny, who also keeps a hundred or so vicious bulldogs fenced in her yard. The sight of Sylvester repeatedly falling into this roiling mass of teeth and claws in his attempts to get into the house are somewhat nightmarish.
"Snow Business" (1953) is the first time we see "Tweety & Sylvester" billed together as a team. They start out as friends this time, until they get snowed in up in Granny's mountain cabin with nothing to eat but bird seed. While a starving Sylvester tries to trick Tweety into a boiling stew pot, he must also avoid a hungry mouse who's after him. For some reason, the cat never thinks of eating the mouse.
"Satan's Waitin'" (1954) suffers from an unwieldy premise--Sylvester gets killed while chasing Tweety, goes to Hell, then finds that his punishment will be delayed while his other eight lives are snuffed out one by one. An unfunny bulldog-Satan eggs them on in a series of tepid gags, each climaxing with another death. Geez, getting hit with a broom is bad enough--I don't really want to see Sylvester being cast into a fiery lake of devilish bulldogs for all eternity.
1961's "The Last Hungry Cat" shows the more modern influence of later WB cartoons with angular backgrounds rendered in an appealingly creative way. High concept strikes again in this spoof of "The Alfred Hitchcock Show" in which Sylvester thinks he has "murdered" Tweety and is sought by the police. The guilt-ridden cat suffers a torturous, sleepless night, constantly needled by the Hitchcock-like narrator, until he discovers Tweety is still alive and reverts back to form. While this short is nice to look at, it just isn't funny.
The trend of over-thinking these stories continues with "Birds Anonymous" (1957). Sylvester is initiated into an "AA"-type group for bird-crazed cats, who are presented as helpless addicts. ("I was a three-bird-a-day cat," one of them testifies.)
Increasingly preoccupied with being clever, the writers of these later cartoons sometimes forget to pack in the funny, fast-paced gags that made this series so popular in the first place. Here, Sylvester endures yet another mental ordeal, with a grotesque bloodshot-eyes closeup that's almost a duplicate of the one from "The Last Hungry Cat." Why the heck has Sylvester suddenly turned into Ray Milland?
The final short in the collection, "Tweety and the Beanstalk" (1957), is a fun take-off on the old fairytale (June Foray can be heard as the unseen woman who throws Jack's magic beans out the window). The idea of Sylvester running around the giant's castle trying to nab a Tweety who's the same size as him, while eluding a monstrous bulldog, sounds tiresome at first but actually manages to generate some old-style sight gags with an outrageous ending.
The DVD is in standard format (no choice of matted widescreen this time) with Dolby Digital English and Spanish mono sound, and subtitles in English and French. The titles on this disc have appeared previously in other Warner Brothers DVD collections.
While uneven in quality, the fifteen shorts in LOONEY TUNES SUPER STARS: TWEETY & SYLVESTER are examples of some of the finest theatrical cartoons ever produced by one of the top animation studios of its time, in an era when such fare was designed to be enjoyed and appreciated by audiences of all ages.
Originally posted on 12/27/11
Sizzling with supercharged action, the simple plot of director Takeshi Koike's sci-fi anime REDLINE (2009) serves as a backdrop for some of the most mindblowing, audacious cartoon animation to ever blaze its way across the screen.
The pre-titles sequence features a qualifying "Yellowline" race in the desert that already makes the podrace from THE PHANTOM MENACE look like a frog-jumping competition. We meet J.P., who resembles a brawny Ricky Nelson with a skyscraper pompadour and, thanks to his crooked partner Frisbee, has a reputation for fixing races. Sure enough, Frisbee's in deep with the mob on this one and sabotages J.P.'s car near the finish line, landing him in the hospital.
When some of the qualifiers for the Redline drop out, J.P.'s back in the game along with his heartthrob Sonoshee, a lovely lass with more interest in machines than men. But the location for the race turns out to be Roboworld, a militaristic society whose leaders are so opposed to the competition taking place on their world (and possibly having some of their military secrets broadcast galaxy-wide) that they declare all-out war against the racers. In order to win this one, J.P. will have to battle it out against ruthless drivers (including Sonoshee), the entire military force of Roboworld, and perhaps even his own sidekick Frisbee.
Fans of non-CGI animation should have a ball reveling in this 100% hand-drawn visual feast, whose creators invested seven years and 100,000 drawings in its making. Each frame of this dazzling tribute to old-school cartoon wizardry is as insanely detailed as panels from the more extravagant underground comix of the 60s and 70s, and unlike digital cartoons you can see the artists' and animators' hands in every painstaking detail.
The dynamic, hard-edged drawing style, a eye-pleasing mix of both the futuristic and retro, yields a wealth of beautifully-rendered character designs and backgrounds that are then brought to vivid life. Surreal touches, such as J.P.'s gravity-defying hairdo and an endless parade of grotesque aliens, rub shoulders with the hard-edged yet wildly-imaginative hardware of cars, spaceships, and other machinery.
The over-the-top character design (by co-writer Katsuhito Ishii, who also worked on the anime sequence from KILL BILL, VOL. 1 and helped create REDLINE's outstanding soundtrack) goes well with the film's larger-than-life cast of oddballs. These include J.P.'s multi-armed canine mechanic Pops, the towering cyborg Machine Head, and the various other racers whose bizarre appearance and unique personalities keep things interesting. Even the crowd scenes are filled with a vast array of colorful "extras."
While the plot busies itself with various concerns such as J.P.'s wooing of the reluctant Sonoshee and Frisbee's conflict of loyalties between him and the mob, REDLINE roars to life during its many spectacular action sequences. The imposing Colonel Votron and his Roboworld army launch a full-scale attack on the racers that begins when they leave the mothership and attempt to land their shuttle vehicles on the planet. The race itself is a non-stop series of thrilling setpieces which lead to the activation of the Roboworld president's ace in the hole, an out-of-control behemoth known as "Funky Boy" who proceeds to destroy everything in sight.
The DVD from Anchor Bay's "Manga" label is in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby 5.1 and 2.0 soundtracks in both Japanese and English, with English subtitles. Extras consist of a 24-minute making-of featurette and the film's trailer.
Thrilling, funny, and endlessly watchable, REDLINE is chock-full of some of the most visually-stunning racing action and futuristic warfare ever created for an animated film. Best of all, it's a return to the glory days of hand-drawn animation which, in the words of its creators, offers something new by doing things the old way again.
Originally posted on 1/20/19
Danish director Birgitte Stærmose (DARLING, ISTEDGADE) and prolific screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson (PERFECT SENSE, ACCUSED) have set out to make us all sad, contemplative, and mesmerized with their gloomy drama ROOM 304 (aka "Værelse 304"), which is like one of those long, detailed dreams that skirts the boundary between the nightmarish and the mundane.
It all takes place in a high-class hotel where all the characters or their relatives work, but instead of being the story of the everyday behind-the-scenes drama of managing a bustling hotel, which I initially expected, it's really a fairly simple account of the romantic and interpersonal relationships between some troubled souls who happen to work in the confined spaces of a big, oppressive hotel.
To make the simple storylines more interesting, screenwriter Aakeson has gathered up all the scenes and laid them out like jumbled jigsaw puzzle pieces for us to try and sort out ourselves. That way we see things that will occur much later and don't understand them until they reappear in a different context, when everything finally starts to come together.
Originally posted on 9/8/12
When adult filmmaker Doris Wishman got together with bazooka-boobed Polish stripper Chesty Morgan in the mid-70s, the result was two of the most head-scratchingly cockeyed and totally off-the-wall nudesploitation flicks ever made. "Deadly Weapons" and "Double Agent 73" are now together on the same Blu-Ray disc along with an unofficial non-Chesty follow-up, "The Immoral Three", to form the Something Weird Video collection CHESTY MORGAN'S BOSOM BUDDIES.
It was a match made in junk-film heaven--Wishman, a filmmaker with an abundance of energy and enthusiasm but little actual skill, and Chesty, a stunning human visual effect who nevertheless displays absolutely no natural talent whatsoever in front of the camera. In fact, her absolute lack of any discernible acting skill makes everyone and everything else around her seem better by default. And yet, with those mind-bogglingly huge all-natural hooters and preternaturally unaffected (some might say "spaced-out") expression, she somehow demands our disbelieving attention every second she's on the screen.
"Deadly Weapons" (1974) features Chesty (here billed as "Zsa Zsa") as the faithful wife of a mob wiseguy named Larry who gets whacked after he steals an incriminating address book and tries to blackmail his boss with it. The grief-stricken Chesty vows revenge. Overhearing one of her hubby's killers referring to his addiction to "burlesque", Chesty knows what she must do--get a job as a stripper and wait for him to show up at the club.
