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 

Midnite Ride #33: Tales From the Crypt and The Baby

Large William discusse Tales From the Crypt (1972) and The Baby (1973).

Direct download: CryptBabyMidniteRide.mp3

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Adios!!!

Midnite Ride #28: Tenement

Welcome back to another Midnite Ride!!!

This time Karl and Matt review Tenement (1985) directed by Roberta Findlay!!!

Direct download: MidniteRide_Tenement.mp3

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Love Me Deadly (1972)

I have been to literally dozens of funerals in my life.  I’ve probably been to more funerals than I’ve been to weddings.  And I have been going to funerals since I was just a kid.  So we’re clear, I didn’t seek funerals out and skulk around morgues or anything.  My family simply had no problem with accepting that death is as much a part of life as birth is, and we should respect that whoever is in the casket is gone now and show that respect to the deceased and their family by being there and bearing witness as they’re interred in their final resting place.  Going way back in my family’s history, when someone would pass on their body would often be kept in the house for viewings and so on.  In fact, the house I occupy right now has had quite a few corpses hanging around in it from time to time.  I’m surprised the place isn’t haunted (wait…did you hear that noise?).  

It’s always interesting to me, then, when I hear from parents who won’t take their children to viewings and/or funerals.  I’m not a parent, so I have no skin in the game on this, and certainly my opinion is not going to be fully informed because of that.  But I would like to think that, were I a parent, I wouldn’t have a lot of trepidation about bringing my kids to a funeral.  For the level of permissiveness I have seen from some parents toward their scions, to not acclimate them to the concept of death is just odd to me.  It’s not the sort of decision I would get in an argument over, and I get where some parents are coming from with it, so I don’t fault them, per se.  And now you know where I stand on kids and funerals.  Onward and downward…

Lindsay Finch (Mary Wilcox) likes to attend wakes, and, once all the other mourners have left, she enjoys kissing and fondling the corpses being viewed.  Mortician Fred (Timothy Scott) espies Lindsay’s secret, and he lets her in on one of his own: He (and several compatriots) are also necrophiliacs, and they often convene at his mortuary to desecrate corpses together.  Meanwhile, Lindsay meets cute with art gallery owner Alex (Lyle Waggoner) while attending his brother’s wake, and the two soon form an amorous relationship.  But Alex can’t figure out why Lindsay won’t consummate with him.

Jacques La Certe’s Love Me Deadly (aka Secrets Of The Death Room) is simply bizarre just on its face.  To a genre film lover, this type of film should be on all sorts of favorite movie lists.  But it’s not, and there are reasons for that, and we’ll get to them later.  The instant this plot is put forth, it is almost impossible to not think of Joe D’Amato’s sleaze classic Buio Omega (aka Beyond The Darkness), though that movie was initially released about six years after this one.  Both films deal with necrophilia, but more than that, they deal with characters who cannot let go of people who were in their lives, so they turn to necrophilia to satisfy their passions.  Further, necrophilia represents a form of possession for these necrophiles of the most intimate kind, and since the corpses cannot object or defend themselves, this is also a violation of the people the deceased once were (there’s a reason it gets lumped under “Desecration of a Corpse” in most law books).  Lindsay’s issues go back to her deep connection with her father (Michael Pardue).  While it is never shown or even implied that their relationship was ever in any way incestuous (in the flashbacks throughout the film, Lindsay’s father is only ever shown as coddling toward his daughter), incestuous is exactly what their relationship became after her dad died.  I mean, as well as necrophilic.  

Lindsay knows that her desires are not culturally (or legally) acceptable, so she indulges them in secret.  Also, the filmmakers hold back on showing her getting completely naked with a dead body, intimating that she has not taken her psychosis to the next level.  It’s a quasi-chaste version of necrophilia, watered down for some level of palatability.  Conversely, Fred not only indulges totally in the act, but he kills to acquire his play things.  To some extent, Fred can be seen as a cult leader, the other necrophiles in his sect following his lead.  When the group gets together, they not only want to have sex with a corpse, they want to mutilate it as well.  They scratch them, whip them, and stab them, indicating a more sadomasochistic (read: deviant) angle to their obsession).  There is also the implication that the cult is satanic in nature, though religion is never overtly brought up even once.  Nevertheless, they behave like a satanic cult from the movies.  They wear dark robes and nothing else.  They look like filthy hippies.  They act in unison, as if performing some sacred ritual.  The idea for a sort of support group for necrophiliacs is interesting, but the only two who are in any way distinct are Lindsay and Fred, and they are separated by the line that Fred will cross and Lindsay (up to this point) will not.

La Certe and company do a nice job of editing the film, especially in their use of transitions.  The film flows quite fluidly between present and past via cutting on action and form cuts.  The best example I can think of is after the scene where Lindsay first stops by Alex’s gallery to find out about an upcoming showing (and by extension to stalk him).  As she walks away, La Certe places the camera at street level, showing Lindsay’s legs strolling down the street from the knees down.  We then cut to the same angle on a younger Lindsay in a flashback segment (which are almost always differentiated by being monochromatic).  The third cut maintains the same angle, but we’re back to the adult Lindsay.  Not only that, but she is now dressed for one of her little outings and about enter a funeral home.  It’s as smooth a piece of transitional montage as you can get. 

That said, much of the rest of the film doesn’t rise to this same level, and I feel that a lot (though not all) of the blame can be placed at the feet of the screenplay (co-written by La Certe).  There are very upbeat (even risible) montages, replete with jaunty, television-level music, and they are inserted at the most awkward of times.  Furthermore (and most infuriating for me), once the cult is introduced to us, they play almost no part whatsoever for much of the film.  There is little to no consequence to pretty much every action the characters make (including and especially murder), and these are simply some of the dumbest people on the planet, if they can’t pick up on the sledgehammer-subtle hints being dropped about what’s actually going on.  And did I mention that Lindsay is borderline infantilistic, to boot?  But again, it’s only when the writers need something to pepper the story up.  All of these wild inconsistencies effectively kill what could have been a fun, sleazy piece of cinema.  To be fair, Love Me Deadly isn’t entirely horrible, but it never reaches for the brass ring that it needed to if it was ever going to be a contender for greatness.  Consequently, I’d classify it as semi-stiff (cue rim shot).

MVT:  I have to admit, it took a set of stones to produce a film like this in the early Seventies, and especially to do so in America.  So, credit where it’s due; that this film exists at all is something of a miracle.  But that it doesn’t live up to its own premise is something of a sin.

Make Or Break:  The Make is the scene where Fred kills a male hustler (played with more than appropriate levels of histrionics by I. William Quinn).  It’s actually a pretty graphic and disturbing scene, and the degree of discomfort is only accentuated by Quinn’s nudity, which provides a squirm-inducing vulnerability for the proceedings.

Score:  6/10       

Episode #187: Arizona Set Pieces

Welcome to another episode of the GGtMC!!!

This week's episode is programmed by the one and only Death Rattle Aaron, a brother from another mother of the Gents, as part of our Kickstarter program. Aaron chose Murder Set Pieces (2004) directed by Nick Palumbo and Raising Arizona (1987) from the Coen Brothers.

Direct download: Arizona_Set_Pieces.mp3

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Voicemails to 206-666-5207

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