Demonwarp (1988)

A minister (John Durbin) reads the Bible to his horse whilst trekking along a trail (his extremely clean “Old West” costume is the only indication we get that this is set before the turn of the Twentieth Century [okay, and the fact that he’s reading the Bible], because a subtitle would have been too tricky to put on screen, I suppose) when he catches sight of a “meteor” which crashes to earth nearby.   Cut to: a bright, sunny day, at a cabin in Demon Wood (duh duh DUUUHHHH!), where Bill (bulletproof check casher George Kennedy) and his doting daughter Julie (Jill Marin) are playing a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit™ when a Bigfoot-ian creature bursts through the door, roughs Bill up, and kills his daughter before dragging her corpse off into the unknown.  Cut to: a van full of idiots, including Jack (David Michael O’Neill), nephew of the owner of the aforementioned cabin, wending its way through the woods to investigate (unbeknownst to all but Jack and his girlfriend Carrie [Pamela Gilbert]) the expanding circle of weird goings-on in the forest (including the disappearance of said uncle).  Horror wants to ensue!

And so we come to Emmett Alston’s Demonwarp, an interesting premise in search of a good execution.  It’s set up initially as a slasher film with an animal (even though we can call the Bigfoot an alien, considering the prologue, but it still acts like an animal) as its villain (most precisely, the one we see the most).  It has the group of horny young people going out to a remote location to be killed in gory fashion.  It has bare female breasts galore (including two belonging to the lovely [and wasted, unless you count her boobs, though it could also be argued that they are the long and the short of her, if one were inclined to be a bit mean about it] Michelle Bauer).  It has a crazy old coot, trying in vain to warn the youths away from the area.  It has POV shots from the monster’s perspective (and I’ll get back to this later) as it stalks its prey.  And this got me thinking.  In many ways, a creature feature isn’t all that different from a slasher movie.  Both have antagonists who pop up at the worst possible times to dispose of irritating characters.  Both have antagonists who represent unknown quantities.  Both have antagonists who are non-verbal in the main (characters like Freddy Krueger and the more charismatic baddies notwithstanding), and in this way are even more inscrutable.  After all, if you don’t know why bad things are happening to you, they seem more tragic (this being based on the notion that most people believe that they are, at heart, good people).  The thing that should separate them is the human psyche, yet the way characters like these are regularly portrayed, there is little indication that such exists outside of the impetus for their individual geneses.  The Bigfoot in this film is not going to answer questions and develop a relationship with Jack like Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling.  The Bigfoot is irrational, animal, primal.  So, the Bigfoot (or something like the bear from Grizzly, let’s say) are essentially the same as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, and both types can then be viewed as universal/natural forces.  They do what they do, they do it very well, and they are inescapable because their victims exist in the villains’ world.  

Another aspect that the film plays with is the concept of fanaticism.  Jack is fanatical about solving the mystery of Demon Wood.  Bill is fanatical about killing the Bigfoot.  The two characters are identical in this way, but they don’t trust one another, fanatics tending to be a bit paranoid.  This fanaticism reduces Jack and Bill to the goal of their myopic quest, and it removes them from the normal world.  They become loners, and, distanced from humanity, they become a bit deranged.  Of course, Kennedy is about ten times (maybe more) the actor that O’Neill is, so it’s possible that Alston and company were trying to delineate the interior conflict between Jack’s crusade into the Bigfoot’s world and his desire to escape from it with his friends and return to the ordinary one.  It doesn’t work, because O’Neill plays Jack as so intense and unlikable (he snaps at Carrie and Cindy [Colleen McDermott] no matter what they say, no matter how much sense or nonsense they talk) that not only do you not want to follow him to the culmination of his journey, but you kind of wish the monster would just appear and rip his head off so that the film would just end.  There is also the fanaticism of the minister, but his fanaticism is purely religious in nature, though, like Jack and Bill, his narrow world view allows him to be lulled in by what he believes to be an angel, though the alien villain (hint: not the Bigfoot) is in actuality a “devil.”  The zealotry of his believer’s mind ultimately makes the minister do evil, because he has essentially met God (to his mind), and since he was devoted to this deity before it asked him to sacrifice human beings (and, of course, there is at least one story with sacrifice at its center in the Bible), it is just a short trip from faithfulness to maleficence (a theme which feels all too easy to believe in the face of what we know about and learn more of in our non-cinematic reality).  All this said, that Jack is allowed to live, even though he doesn’t come to any revelation about his shortcomings, makes no attempt to change himself, and is still a grade-A peckerwood by the time the film ends, makes the film less satisfying than it was already.  His arc is a flatline.  

I’ve said often that POV handheld camera shots do not work all that well when used for an extended period of time (Dark Passage and The Lady in the Lake being the two notable exceptions that always spring to my mind).  In horror films, they tend to work even less, since we know that they are either going to be false (a cat jumps onto a character’s back or whatever) or exactly what they appear to be (yet still somehow unsatisfying in their predetermination).  The effectiveness of this technique varies by filmmaker, and I can confidently say that Emmett Alston is not a director who should employ POV very often, or even at all.  That’s the problem.  Just about every two minutes of Demonwarp, we get either shaky handheld POV shots or shaky handheld shots of legs running or walking (sometimes both).  You may think I’m exaggerating this.  I’m not.  In fact, I may be underestimating the frequency of these occurrences.  I’m guessing that the filmmakers thought this would keep pacing up and build some tension in the stalking scenes.  Instead, it becomes swiftly redundant to the point that I actually groaned every time I saw yet another of these shots (though it does give us Kennedy swinging an ax in direct address, so that’s one in the plus column).  This level of (what I can only surmise is) naiveté, which can be charming even in junk movies, is herein merely annoying, and worst of all, boring.  This is yet another example of a film that has everything I like (mashing up pulp horror and science fiction and revenge and survival genres, amongst other things), but is so breathtakingly dull, it’s a chore to sit through.

MVT:  The Bigfoot costume (and other creature effects), courtesy of John Carl Buechler, are solid fun.  Unfortunately, like a twig placed under a hunk of pig iron, it just can’t hold up enough of the picture to make any of it worth one’s time. 

Make or Break:  The scene where Tom (Billy Jayne of the late, lamented Parker Lewis Can’t Lose television series) goes full Jack Nicholson not only made the large vein in my forehead begin to throb, but it also made me want to grab my television and stomp it to death for showing me this travesty.  Thankfully, the latter never came to fruition.

Score:  3/10

Bound (1996)

Directed by: Andy Wachowski
                    Lana Wachowski 
                   (Credited as the Wachowski Brothers at the time of filming)

Runtime: 108 minutes

Time to look at overlooked film by the Wachowski Siblings. To my limited research and knowledge, this is the only Wachowski film that does not have science fiction or fantasy elements. So this movie has no pseudo-philosophy and bullet time footage and is more a love letter to film noir wrapped around a pair of brass knuckles.

The movie revolves around three characters Violet, Corky, and Caesar. Corky just recently finished a five year sentence for "redistribution of wealth" and has a job renovating the condo next door to Violet and Caesar's condo. Corky catches Violet's eye and vice versa and this leads to Violet easily seducing Corky. And Caesar being completely obvious to this relationship because he's more concerned about Violet running off with his fellow coworkers than having an affair with the condo next door.

Now this isn't a love affair drama and nothing is what it appears to be. Caesar is in the mob and his coworker Johnnie is a psychopath and the son of the boss. Worse, Johnnie will take over as the boss when his father steps down or is gunned down. To make the situation even more complicated Shelly another colleague of Caesar's and a friend of Violet has stolen over two million dollars from the mob.    

Shelly doesn't run away fast enough and is caught and killed by the mob. This act makes Caesar to mistrust Johnnie further and inspires Violet to create a new life. She reaches out to Corky and the two of them create a plan to start new lives and to use the mob to clean up the mess. They set their plan in motion and unintentionally set off other problems a long the way.

I wish the Wachowski's would make more films like this. It is a smaller film world so less time is spent explain why people are there and more time spent on the story. Overall it was an enjoyable film and a must watch for film noir fans and crime drama fans.

MVT: The camera work in this film is amazing. It is something that needs to be seen.

Make or Break: What makes this movie for me is the noir feel this film has captured. All it is missing is being in black and white as it uses shadows to great effect visually.

Score: 7.89 out of 10

Xtro (1982)

There seems to me to be some sort of debate in the realm of cryptids and it relates predominately to preference.  A great many people will believe in either Bigfoot (and other hirsute hominids) or in the Loch Ness Monster (and other aquatic beasties) but not in both (we’ll leave things like the Chupacabra and Mothman out of this for now).  The reasoning typically boils down to their thoughts on what sort of organism could exist in what sort of environment and still manage to elude capture all these years.  Personally, I’m open to the possibility that both exist, but I lean more toward the Bigfoot camp (which should come as no shock to anyone).  It’s also been a source of humor that the only photos ever taken of any of these creatures are always blurry, and I think that means something (the blurry photos, not that they’re a source of humor).  When the pictures are clear, they are instantly suspect, as if the photographer got the animals to stop and strike a pose for a moment (and since they’re supposedly not prepared for these encounters, all the more questionable).  Yet, when they are blurry or indistinct, we tend to be more inclined to accept the likelihood of their authenticity.  In the same way that something like the Zapruder Film is true in its grainy, low fi style (it’s true because it actually happened, and this presentation on film reinforces the reality of it) so is the Patterson Film (and there are folks who still believe it to be real almost half a century later, despite the allegations of it being a hoax down through the years).  

In a time when people somehow manage to whip out their phones and take photos and videos of horrifying accidents and acts of violence (you know, rather than helping or doing something useful, but that’s a whole different essay) that can hold up in a court of law, is it only a question of time until somebody posts a video of a Yeti jacking somebody’s car on Instagram or whatever?  Either way, there’s a scene in Harry Bromley Davenport’s Xtro in which a couple (played by Katherine Best and Robert Pereno) drive by a bizarre alien (played by special effects), and the way it’s filmed is reminiscent of the better cryptid photos (the monster is seen fleetingly in the corner of the screen), and it’s extraordinarily effective, even though it was most likely shot this way in order to not have the makeup look silly or bad.  Interestingly, this idea is mirrored (and I freely admit that I’m making this connection in my own head) in the character of Joe (Danny Brainin), who is a fashion photographer by trade and the ad hoc father figure to Tony (Simon Nash), whose actual dad, Sam (Philip Sayer) was allegedly abducted by a UFO three years ago and has apparently come back now very much a changed…person.  Joe deals in clarity and beauty for a living, and there’s a falseness associated with this (as there is with all businesses that trade in glamour/skin/et cetera) that marks Joe himself as false and unsuitable to ever truly be a father to Tony (and moreso since he is ineffective outside his professional expertise).  By contrast, Sam is sketchy, indistinct (he claims to not remember anything before the morning he appears on Rachel’s [Bernice Stegers] doorstep), especially in his first encounter with humans (mentioned above), and that, to my mind, marks him as authentic, though whether it means he is a positive force is another matter.  Joe is the fantasy of a normal life.  Sam is the fantasy of an extraordinary life.  The two can’t really coexist, and the latter is incredibly bizarre, but still, this is one of the movie’s more intriguing aspects.

In this same way, the film is centered on family in the face of trauma, absentee fathers, and replacement family members.  Tony spends a lot of the first few times he’s on screen sweating and having night terrors.  He even wakes up covered in blood (whose it is, we never find out).  The Phillips family has been decimated by the disappearance of Sam, though the only one who knows the truth of what happened is Tony, and this truth both links him to his father and wreaks a terrible price on the boy’s body.  In the wake of her original, normative family’s disintegration, Rachel has tried to rebuild it with disparate parts.  Joe is supposed to replace Sam, though Joe is never truly vested in that role, and he can’t handle it anyway when push comes to shove.  He cannot fill Sam’s shoes (except possibly in the bedroom).  Analise (Maryam d’Abo) is the live-in housekeeper.  She takes Tony where he needs to go, looks after the house, and so on.  In effect, she is Rachel’s choice to replace herself, since the family proper has been dismantled.  Still and all, Analise cares about Tony only as a job.  Her attention is almost solely on getting laid by her boyfriend, even to the point of doing it while she’s on duty.  That none of these replacement components totally fits and this new family never really works is unsurprising, since the underlying thought I got was that none of this was done out of love, merely out of necessity.  Rachel needed a man to satisfy her, and she needed a woman to maintain the household.  She abrogates her familial responsibility because Sam left, and she is, at heart, a selfish person.  When Sam returns, his focus is on Tony, not Rachel, nonetheless she is willing and able to leave her ad hoc family for the false chance at a new beginning with her old one.  Naturally, this is destined for failure on all fronts (and how; I should also mention that this film isn’t especially nice to women in general).  Sam is punishing Rachel for not carrying the weight that was dropped on her, and she accepts this punishment at every turn.         

Now, I can’t say I liked Xtro.  The plot is nonsensical, and what is there is so thin it only has one side.  The acting is acceptable at best (though, to get crass, d’Abo doesn’t really need to show her acting chops off since she’s happy to show off her more physical attributes).  The characters are all a bunch of jerks.  Even the central relationship of the film between Sam and Tony doesn’t completely work, since these two are self-involved in the extreme (another major theme of the film being adolescent wish fulfilment which applies to all the characters, age notwithstanding).  This film lives and dies on (and appears to have been produced solely to showcase) its practical special effects, and they work very well, all things considered.  If nothing else, Davenport and company know how to stage and shoot effects work.  But even the effects have no consistency.  Sam goes through several metamorphoses, none of which are explained, and none of which feel like organic extensions of one another.  These chunks of latex rubber and goop and fake blood look good, and they have impact in terms of being visually memorable in a “did you see that shit?!” fashion, but they don’t resonate with any sort of lasting meaning or play any role in the sense of narrative coherence.  Being a massive fan of effects, I give the film props for its accomplishments in that area.  Nevertheless, in every other area it fails while trying to say something worthwhile, in my opinion.

MVT:  The effects shine throughout.  They are appropriately weird and offbeat, gory and slimy, and wonderful to watch on screen.

Make or Break:  There’s a famous (nay, infamous) scene (once aptly described by Fangoria’s Dr. Cyclops [if memory serves] as a “white knuckler”) involving an unusual birth.  I won’t say more, since it must be seen for oneself to be believed.  But wow.

Score:  5/10

Wicked City (1987)

Taki (voiced in the American dub by Gregory Snegoff) is hipped to the transience of our world’s tenuous treaty with the Black World (a parallel dimension [?] populated by grotesque monsters) after a near death experience with not-so-hot bar pickup Kanako (Edie Mirman).  A member of the secretive Black Guard who defend humanity from the Black Worlders, he is assigned to protect Giuseppe Mayart (Mike Reynolds), an ancient, pervy old man who is the key to renewing the accord for another five hundred years.  The beauteous Makie (Gaye Kruger), Taki’s opposite number in the Black World, is forced upon our hapless human hero (apologies to Stan Lee), but will tensions flare between this mismatched pair, or will love blossom?  If you guessed neither, you’re not far off.

With some tweaks to the details of the story, one could believe this anime sprang from the mind of someone like David Cronenberg or Clive Barker, but it actually crawled forth from the pen of Hideyuki Kikuchi who created the Wicked City property in 1985 with the first book, Wicked City: Black Guard.  I’m uncertain if the franchise spawned a manga or not, but the anime, directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, is one of two adaptations of it for motion pictures (though I think this was an OVA [Original Video Animation, i.e. it was produced for and released directly to the home video market], so it never saw theatrical play).  The other was Tai Kit Mak’s 1992 live action take (produced by Tsui Hark), and the only thing I can distinctly remember about that one is that it was an indecipherable mess, visually and narratively.  The anime, while slightly easier to understand, is, in my opinion, just as much of a mess.  The characters are cardboard cutouts without personality (what personality is there is patently unlikable and uninteresting), and their relationships completely fizzle, in part because every line is delivered as if pronounced by somnambulists.  The story is paper thin and been done to death for decades.  That would be all well and good, if there was something else to bolster the retreading, and there is (sex and violence), but, somehow, here it’s just not good enough, even though brief moments do shine quite brightly, which makes it all the more disappointing (and if you want to see an actually good collaboration between Kikuchi and Kawajiri, I would suggest checking out the ultra-fun Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust).  I honestly can’t say I’ve been more bored by something as over the top as Wicked City in a long, long time.   

There has been some debate over whether or not this cartoon should be considered hentai (for the sake of simplicity and expediency, think “tentacle porn”), and even though I’m not anime guru enough to fully debate the issue, pro or con, I can say definitively that there is some explicit stuff going on here.  There is a vagina dentata (of a sort) on display.  There is a woman’s body that opens up like a giant, diseased vagina (shades of Videodrome).  There is a woman being involuntarily fingered by a former friend/lover.  There is a penis-snake-like monster that fucks a woman’s mouth.  There is a gang rape.  Sex in the world of Wicked City is dangerous, whether you want to have it or not.  It should be noted that a lot of this sexual violation and violence happens to the same woman, so it’s difficult to believe that there isn’t some kind of dislike for her going on under the surface (okay, it’s right there in front of your face; there’s nothing subtle about it).  

Compare that to the men in the film.   They are consummate womanizers.  Giuseppe lusts after Makie and blatantly grabs her ass as well as rubs her legs while she tries to ignore him.  Taki wins a bet with his bartender pal when he scores with Kanako.  Giuseppe loves his porn (he even tries to get Makie to watch some with him; what woman could resist?) and is simply dying to get his rocks off with a prostitute.  Bearing this in mind, the men get to have voluntary, pleasant enough sex with women before being attacked by whatever monster into which the woman will transform (and this setup where all of the women that the human men have sex with are literally horrors is telling; women clearly can’t be trusted in the slightest, and the men are dolts for not being able to choose their lays better).  Further, the monster women seem intent on eating the men (or some vital aspect of them), and not in the foreplay sense of the word.  The males are violently consumed by the females, the females are violently penetrated by the males.  Naturally, neither turn of events is especially desirable, but the latter has an innate sense of sleazy misogyny to it that’s rough going.  However, it’s the choice the characters get to make before the violence that makes the difference, and the women don’t really get a choice at all.  Although it doesn’t particularly bother me in the context of the film and its universe, the sexual politics of the anime will turn some people off, just as it will turn others on, so you’re aware.

 Like so very, very many mismatched action partners (Riggs and Murtaugh from the Lethal Weapon films, Sykes and Francisco from Alien Nation, Gallagher and Beck from The Hidden, ad infinitum), Wicked City has a duo that is diametrically opposed but is forced to work together.  Well, that’s something of an overstatement, actually.  Makie and Taki don’t really have anything against each other beside their dislike and distrust for the other’s “country” of origin.  They don’t bicker and argue, they don’t have any physical altercations with each other (that I can recall), and there is no begrudging respect that builds between the two.  The instant they meet, Taki refers to Makie as “disgustingly perfect” (what a honeydripper!), and you know it’s basically a waiting game until the two are in bed together (and it’s not a very exciting waiting game at that).  Sparks do not fly, because none of the emotion the filmmakers are trying to convey is earned, and even if they did earn it (which, I maintain, they didn’t), it feels hollow and false, because these characters are merely sacks of meat going through the motions with other sacks of meat.  The anime is loaded from stem to stern with bodies displayed inside and out, but none of them is filled with anything I would call a heart.

MVT:  Sex and violence is the name of the game, and the film delivers the goods in these regards.  It just doesn’t deliver anything else that’s all that interesting or involving.

Make or Break:  The opening scene (you’ve likely seen a fairly famous still from it if you’ve ever searched for this movie on the internet) sets up the world and the type of characters who inhabit it handily.  It also forewarns of the film’s problems early on, so if you’re not all in by the end of this scene, you never will be.

Score:  5/10