Rat Man (1988)

I was not a huge fan of the show Friends, even when it was at its most popular.  Maybe it’s because I was severely inebriated much of the time it was first being shown.  Maybe it’s because these characters and their lifestyle were so alien to me.  Maybe it’s because the show isn’t very good.  Maybe it’s a combination of a multiplicity of factors.  Regardless, there was one bit they did on the show that has always stuck with me, and I still refer to it to this day.  Ditzy blonde Phoebe is talking with smarmy Chandler, and she inquires why Spider-Man isn’t pronounced like Goldman, Silverman, etcetera.  Chandler, astonished by this (more or less his permanent state of being throughout the series), explains that it’s “because it isn’t his last name, like Phil Spiderman.  He’s a Spider…Man.”  I catch myself far too often pronouncing the names of superheroes like Phoebe would, and, even though it’s not laugh out loud funny, I do find it endlessly amusing.  This is possibly the elitist comic book fan in me taking a poke at people who “aren’t in the know” or maybe just taking a poke at elitist comic book fans themselves.  That said, even though Peter Parker is not, in fact, part spider (I’m not as up on the character as I once was, so this may have changed), the little fella dubbed Mousey (Nelson de la Rosa, whom most people know, ironically enough, from the John Frankenheimer/Richard Stanley version of The Island of Dr. Moreau) in Giuliano Carnimeo’s (under the genius pseudonym Anthony Ascot) Rat Man (aka Quella Villa in fondo al Parco, which translates roughly to That Villa at the Bottom of the Park, which may very well be a better title or may simply be the film’s producers desperately trying to cash in on The Last House on the Left sixteen years later; leave it to the Italians to beat a dead horse into glue) most definitely is part rat.  The problem is, he’s also part monkey, so, if anything, the film should have been called Rat Monkey, but I guess that just sounded more like a nature documentary than a horror film.  I would rather watch that fictional documentary than either Friends or Rat Man ever again.

Crusty, sweaty Dr. Olman (Pepito Guerra) is set to unveil Mousey to the world at the next scientician conference when the little rascal makes good his escape.  Next thing you know, bikini models like Marilyn (Eva Grimaldi) are being spied on and chased around, and her sister Terry (the divine Janet Agren) has to team up with perpetually-open-shirted crime writer Fred (David Warbeck) to track her down and save her.  

Rat Man owes the entirety of its existence to two sources.  One is the Slasher film.  On top of Mousey’s natural predilection for murdering people thither and yon accompanied by copious amounts of blood, Carnimeo delights in two types of Slasher-esque shot whenever Mousey is around (which is constantly; this little fucker is more ubiquitous than air).  The first is the classic point of view shot, and, of course, it’s from Mousey’s perspective.  The thing of it is, these POV shots are overused, so they are not nearly as effective as they could be.  Every now and then, it might be nice to build a little tension by not signaling to the audience that the tiny terror is lurking just out of sight.  The second type of shot which is repeated early and often is the extreme closeup.  There are multiple cutaways to a detail of Mousey’s dark, little eyeball.  Later, there are closeups of his fangs and claws as he attacks.  These shots, in my opinion, work better than the flood of POV shots, but even these wear out their welcome and detract from what the audience wants to see, namely, the “critter from the shitter” (that’s part of one of the film’s taglines, and he does, indeed, crawl out of a toilet at one point in the movie) gnawing away at young, pink flesh and innards for minutes on end.

The other major influence on this movie, as you may have guessed, is H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau.  To be more precise, Carnimeo and company ignored the anti-vivisection angle of the novel, focusing on the juicier aspects.  For example, Mousey is a combination of animals in humanoid form.  Dr. Olman walks around in a Panama suit, was shunned by the scientific community for his activities, and cares more about proving the value of his work (the purpose of his experiments is never explained to us) than he does for any living thing.  Olman has a loyal assistant, Tonio, who fills the Montgomery role, though far more incompetently.  Marilyn and skanky photographer Mark (Werner Pochath) come to be at Olman’s villa because of a car wreck instead of a shipwreck, but the effect is the same.  Mousey revolts against Olman and causes havoc on the villa and its occupants, and this is the heart of what the film is in its entirety.  It’s little more than a drawn out, constant stream of “animal” attacks, none of which are suspenseful, and none of which are all that satisfying in the gore department, either.  Why Fred and Terry are in the film at all is mindboggling, since all they do is tool around looking vaguely inquisitive, are flat as a pancake character-wise, and serve no narrative function whatsoever other than to facilitate the indifferently obvious “twist” ending (though, I’ll be honest, I could stare at Agren all day, every day).

I’ve read in several places how this film is supposed to be a sleazy piece of trash.  I can verify the latter half of that statement, but the sleazy part has me confused.  There’s some nudity from Grimaldi, there’s some shitty gore (including a skull sitting in a puddle of what looks like Ragu spaghetti sauce), and Mousey himself certainly appears greasy as all hell.  But outside of that, Rat Man is tame stuff.  Worse than that, it is hardly a movie, as it doesn’t attempt to develop a story in any way.  It’s a very simple idea that, instead of doing anything interesting with, the filmmakers simply padded out with somnolent sequences that don’t go anywhere.  Mousey may be a critter, but perhaps he and this film would have been better off left in the shitter.            

MVT:  I want to give it to Janet Agren, just for being Janet Agren, but I’m going to have to go full-pig and give it to Grimaldi for stripping down and showing off her appreciable assets.

Make or Break:  Probably around the third or fourth time Carnimeo cut back to Terry and Fred driving around in the dark, as if they’re going to find anything remotely interesting in what is the ultimate in cinematic blue balls.

Score:  4.5/10

Horror Hospital (1973)

Hospitals are innately scary for those not involved in the medical profession (I’ve probably done this exact intro before, but a little self-plagiarism never hurt anyone).  Here’s a place where the human body is parts of a machine, a place where blood and innards are routinely let free from their skin prisons.  People go there when they’re in pain, and part of the anxiety of the place is that they don’t know whether or not they’re going to experience still more pain during the healing process.  Moreover, there is the fear of not knowing what’s ailing you until some nebulous diagnostic process is complete.  Is that stomach pain just gas, or do you have inoperable cancer?  Of course, doctors and nurses care about the people they see, but there’s also a necessary aloofness they adopt by necessity that only adds to the unease of being in one of these places.  And then there are the multitude of insane doctors of the cinema who want to ravage your body, experiment on you against your will, build monsters out of corpse pieces, and so on.  Admit it, you may like the guy who comes around a couple times a day to read your chart and prod you with sharp metal things, but deep down you’re pondering if he’s simply browsing over you like the headlight section of an auto parts store.  Medicos like Dr. Storm (Michael Gough) in Atony Balch’s Horror Hospital (aka Computer Killers aka Doctor Bloodbath aka Death Ward #13 aka Mad House aka Frankenstein’s Horror-Klinik) go a step further, disguising their misdeeds under the guise of spas, rehabs, etcetera, where pain and torture is the last thing on the minds of his unwitting victims (quite literally).  Which reminds me, I’m due for a few booster shots.

Jason (Robin Askwith) is a young songwriter fed up with pretty much everything in groovy London and stressed to the gills.  Responding to travel agent Mr. Pollack’s (Dennis Price) advert for a cheap getaway, Jason heads off for Dr. Storm’s “health hotel.”  Along the way, he meets up with Judy (Vanessa Shaw), who is on her way to the same place to find her Aunt Harris (Ellen Pollock), a former whorehouse madam.  Things turn suspect pretty fast once the budding young couple arrive at the estate, as they are placed squarely in the sights of the nefarious Storm and his twisted cohorts.

Horror Hospital is very clearly modeled on Robert Fuest’s superlative The Abominable Dr. Phibes.  This is evident right from jump street, as the film opens with Storm and his diminutive henchman Frederick (Skip Martin) sitting in the doctor’s car waiting for a couple of escapees to stumble by.  Storm is dressed in a natty black ensemble which includes a wide-brimmed fur hat.  The car has a couple of blades that pop out of the sides to decapitate the youths (I still can’t figure out exactly how, because the blades appear far too low to accomplish such a task), dropping their melons into handy burlap sacks located just past the blades.  The oddities pile up, as there is a silly putty monster who occasionally snags a new victim.  The water tap in Jason and Judy’s room runs red with blood (“Don’t forget to brush your teeth,” Frederick’s ominous line to the two is one my brothers and I imitated for a long time after we first saw this film way back when).  Storm’s “computer killers” are always in composed order, the settings they are in organized tableaux.  The doctors in both films are crippled in some fashion (Phibes can’t speak without aid of a gadget, Storm is wheelchair-bound), but are also hiding very gruesome secrets behind their surface infirmities.

Horror Hospital doesn’t have the visual imagination of Fuest’s opus, however, and Gough plays Storm in much straighter fashion than Vincent Price’s Phibes.  What Balch’s film does instead is amps up the salacious elements.  Real raw calves’ brains are served for dinner.  Shaw gets naked a few times, and her character hops into bed with Askwith’s pretty fast under less than romantic circumstances (and difficult to understand since Jason’s as magnetic as a sheet of paper).  Pollack, an overtly predatory gay character, casts his eyes to Jason’s crotch (the camera follows suit) and “hints” at the fun the two of them could have.  There is blood all over the place in the film, as well.  Aunt Harris used to run a brothel and has settled nicely into the role of Storm’s primary aide (a flesh trade of another sort).  And let’s not forget the malevolent dwarf who lives to taunt Storm’s guests.  This is a black comedy with a sleazy, populist bent, interested in giving the crowd what it wants served between two thick slices of wry.  It’s a grand guignol filled with trashy, modern sensibilities.  If the two films were adult magazines, Phibes would be Penthouse and Hospital would be Hooker (and, hey, we know there’s a place for both, right?).  

Horror Hospital deals with youth culture in an interesting way.  As we’re introduced to Jason, he’s watching a band he wrote a song for do it a disservice, and he loudly vocalizes this to the crowd around him, going so far as to call the band’s singer a “faggot.”  He greets Judy by telling her he’s totally not going to rape her (easily one of the most charming opening lines I’ve ever heard) then proceeds to mooch food from her.  Jason is a snotty little ball of attitude who believes the world owes him something, and he’s not above sticking his thumb in the world’s collective eye to get it.  Judy is played more innocently as she almost immediately opens up completely to Jason with doe-eyed earnestness.  That she becomes romantically involved with Jason aligns her with Jason’s world view, and so she must be punished along with him.  In fact, all of Storm’s patients are young adults.  He is taking vengeance on the young and able-bodied out of self-pity for his own condition, making them his slaves and removing their troublesome individual identities (in essence, he’s the ultimate grumpy old man).  Naturally, the tables will be turned on Storm and company, and this presents us with a validation of the cocky perspective of the Jasons of the world.  Simultaneously, their willingness, even eagerness, to use Storm’s appurtenances against him states that they finally become like him (as all youth eventually molts, transformed into the establishment it railed against for so long).  The insanity of Storm’s world is contagious and a valuable educational tool for the harsh reality that young people need to learn in order to not only survive but dominate.

MVT:  The film has a terrific pulp, camp sensibility that helps it transcend its shortcomings with something odd or creepy around every corner.

Make or Break:  The opening sweeps you into the film’s world handily, and, like Frederick is bade by his master, makes “a clean job of it.”

Score:  7/10

The Suckling (1990)

**SPOILERS**

An opening crawl informs us that, on April 1, 1973 (y’know, April Fool’s Day), a bunch of prostitutes and other sundry folks were killed at a rundown brothel/abortion clinic.  The lone survivor, an unidentified woman (in both the film and its credits, though she’s played by Lisa Petruno, and for the purposes of this review I’ll refer to her as The Mother), is kept at an asylum, where two doctors somnambulistically discuss her case.  Flashback to: the fateful day, where an abortion goes very, VERY wrong.

Francis Teri’s The Suckling (aka Sewage Baby) is a simultaneously tasteless and fascinating film.  Obviously, any movie using abortion as a springboard for gore effects is going to be tacky to some degree or another, yet there are things going on under the surface here that intrigue as well as exploit.  So, let’s look at the more serious side here to start.  Roe v. Wade was passed in January of 1973, making abortion legal under the Constitution of the United States of America.  Since the film takes place in April of that same year, it follows that Phil (the father) and The Mother didn’t have to go to a back alley abortion clinic from a legal standpoint (she states that “this place is illegal”; it wasn’t by this point, but for the sake of argument let’s agree that maybe she didn’t know about the Supreme Court’s decision).  Nonetheless, the very idea of abortion still had a stigma to it (and still does to a certain extent even today), as did pregnancies outside of wedlock (damned if you do, damned if you don’t).  The Mother doesn’t want the abortion.  She wants to put the baby up for adoption as soon as it’s born.  Phil, surely thinking only of his reputation, insists that she go just to talk it over with Big Mama (Janet Sovey), the madam and abortionist at the whorehouse.  The Mother is drugged, and the fetus is forcibly aborted, an encroachment of The Mother’s rights and an assault on her body that is, frankly, heinous.  By violating The Mother so personally, the characters in the brothel (and anyone associated with them) damn themselves.  Because she didn’t want the abortion in the first place, The Mother and the Suckling still share a symbiotic connection, symbolized by the deadly umbilicus that the fetus grows (helped greatly by some convenient toxic waste that drips down onto it) after being flushed down the toilet and landing in one of the smokiest sewers ever put to film.  The Mother is devastated by the loss of her baby against her will, and the Suckling responds to this.

This bond between The Mother and the Suckling manifests itself in the brothel.  After beginning its assault, the Suckling envelops the house in a placenta that the characters cannot break through, and even if they did, it would dissolve them.  First, this traps the characters in one location for easy pickings.  Second, it re-encases the Suckling in the womb from which both it and its mom didn’t want it to be removed.  The Suckling reacts, I tend to believe, to The Mother’s conscious and unconscious desires and protects her while also taking revenge against the people who hurt her.  The longing to return to the womb exhibits itself later on when the Suckling literally shrinks to its birth size and reinserts itself into The Mother.  She is already on the edge by this point in the film, and it really makes you wonder whether this wish fulfillment pushed her over the precipice, because something monstrous happened to her when the fetus was removed from her (with a wire hanger on which Big Mama hangs her coat, by the by) and something monstrous happened to her again when this malevolent creature thrust itself back inside her (which is also a bit Oedipal in my opinion, especially considering what happens to Phil).  In a way, The Mother’s body ownership is taken away from her completely by both the abortionists and by her own child, and in the end, she has shut down, a piece of meat that can no longer choose for herself what to do with her body.  The Suckling protects her from harm while it also possesses her body for itself, the symbiosis between mother and child turned toxic and permanent.

The Suckling is also unafraid to go extremely broad in its humor, a decision I’m unsure about to the extent of whether it helps or harms the film (though I do tend to lean towards the latter, because it’s frankly not clever or subtle enough to be successful as black comedy, and in the context of this film, I think that’s key).  For example, a nerdy guy in a loud plaid suit and bowtie and a kid with the word “fuck” written on his tee shirt gawp as a man liquefies in front of them (a blunt, one-note “joke,” to be sure).  The clearest exemplar, however, is the rich john who visits the brothel while the abortion is taking place.  He enjoys getting pegged with a large dildo while wearing a propeller-topped beanie.  Said propeller, naturally, responds to what happens to this guy’s body, spinning and even popping off at one point (to the accompaniment of goofy sound effects).  The prostitute he’s with rolls her eyes and leaves in the middle of their session.  Later, he’ll be made to bark like a dog in a different context.  But he’s wealthy and entitled, and for as much as he sees himself as above the prostitutes in the brothel, his bizarre proclivities, his dirty little secrets, make him lower than them.  The prostitutes work for their money, and this is just a job for them, an act they put on in private.  The john, by contrast, puts his act on in public.  In private, his true self comes out, and it’s the hypocrisy of respectability that is lampooned (successfully or not) in the scenes with him.

The Suckling itself is a decent monster makeup, even for how odd it is.  It has spikes everywhere on its body and hook hands (and I have never completely understood beasts with hooks for hands like Gigan, the Hook Horror from Dungeons & Dragons, et cetera; they’re totally impractical outside of the one obvious function, but whatever), and its teeth are about the length of a man’s forearm and protrude from its maw, resembling a pink, slimy Venus flytrap (or the monster from The Terror Within on crack, and The Suckling bears some resemblance to that film in the monster child department, as well; coincidence?).  As a concept, it makes no sense, but as something cool for makeup effects lovers, it works well enough in its uniqueness.

And yet, the film itself is lifeless outside of the gore/effects scenes.  The acting is wooden across the board.  The characters are either irritating or distasteful or both.  There is zero sympathy built up for any of them, including and especially The Mother, who spends the entire movie as a passive, crying lump.  The cinematography is flat and static with the brief exception of the few scenes shot in the sewer which actually looked visually interesting.  There is no plot once the killings start, no tension either between the characters (despite the attempt to do so with the shitheaded thug/contagonist character Axel [Frank Rivera]) or as anticipation for where and when the Suckling will strike next.  So, the best advice I can give to anyone interested enough in watching this movie is to be sure you keep your finger floating over the fast forward button.

MVT:  The effects are about the only thing that worked for me in this.  Maybe that was the point/intent, so credit where it’s due.

Make or Break:  The Break for me was the “funny” scene between the rich john and the hooker.  Humor that low grade takes a certain talent to pull off, and sadly, that talent is lacking here.

Score:  5/10