Sorceress (1982)

The Corsican Brothers is a story by Alexandre Dumas which first saw print in 1844.  In it, the brothers de Franchi, Louis and Lucien, are former conjoined twins who still share a bond that allows (you could argue suffers) them to feel each other’s pain.  If this sounds familiar, it should.  The idea has been adapted to numerous ends over the years.  Of course, there is the eponymous 1941 film starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr (and it should be stated, cinematic adaptations of the novella go back as far as 1898 according to my research), as well as the comedic reworking from Cheech & Chong (of these two, this is the one I’ve watched, for better or worse).  Then there are the maleficent twins Tomax and Xamot from the G.I. Joe cartoons, comics, et cetera.  Even the classic children’s educational show The Electric Company got into the act, though the brothers were renamed Miguel and Ramon and taught us how to form words using sounds like “ow.”  Outside of the obvious comic appeal of the concept, the conceit is intriguing.  It shows us, quite dramatically, that the bonds of family, of blood, are stronger than anything else, and this connection can never be severed, despite our possible desire to do so.  Jack Hill’s (aka Brian Stuart, a pseudonym used after a falling out between the director and Roger Corman, the film’s producer; if memory serves, it’s the name of Corman’s nephew, but don’t quote me on that) Sorceress also deals with the core of The Corsican Brothers, though one would be hard-pressed to say that it handles it even half as carefully or intelligently as Messrs. Chong and Marin.

On a sultry, fog-shrouded night, Traigon (Roberto Ballesteros) and his cronies hunt down Traigon’s wife, who has fled with their newborn twin daughters.  Unable to tell which of the two is the first born (this is crucial for Traigon’s sacrificial plans, though not nearly as crucial as you’d think, as we will learn later), the nefarious sorcerer is thwarted by aged magician and martial artist Krona (Martin LaSalle), who spirits the girls away, gives them some ill-defined superpowers, and spouts some prophetic gunk about them being “the two who are one.”  Fast forward to Mara and Mira’s (Lynette and Leigh Harris, respectively) voluptuous young adulthood, where they inevitably find themselves on the path to slay Traigon and stop his plan along with a small group of disparate allies (Baldar, a Viking [Bruno Rey], Pando, a satyr [David Millbern], and Erlick, a barbarian [Roberto Nelson]).

I know I made a big deal about the Corsican Brothers angle, but aside from the constant reference to “the two who are one” (a phrase which characters spout as if it had been drilled into their heads from birth but without any other context than that it’s important; it’s not), there is only one allusion to the psychic/sensual bond that the sisters share.  Of course, it takes place when one of the twins is having sex, and it gives the filmmakers the impetus to have the other sibling writhe on the ground in orgasmic ecstasy (it should be stated that screenwriter Jim Wynorski’s fingerprints are all over this film, this being one of the larger marks left on it).  So, why make the girls be cosmically/mystically conjoined?  Outside of the standard prophecy angle of the Sword and Sorcery genre, the answer is novelty.  More precisely, it’s the novelty of having two beautiful twins who aren’t afraid to doff their clothes in this milieu.  There is nothing going on in this story that in any way expands on this idea of bonding (at least not that I could see).  Fair play, since the film was a financial hit for Corman and New World Pictures, so the absolute minimum you can say is that one, it is distinguished from other efforts in this genre in this regard, and two, the producers certainly knew their target demographic.

To no one’s surprise, I’m about to labor a point, so bear with me.  There is a heavy religious angle at work in Sorceress, and it all starts at the opening.  The twins are being spirited away from religious zealots who would kill them, shades of the story of Moses (no floating them off down a river, however).  Krona is a Judeo-Christian God parallel with his long beard and mane of hair, his simple attire, and his invulnerability to things like fire.  Krona gives the twins to a couple of lowly goat herders to raise, and these two form a correlation to Joseph and Mary, the lowly carpenter and his wife who reared Jesus to adulthood at the request of God.  Naturally, this being a Sword and Sorcery film, Traigon’s religion is considered evil, calling as it does for the sacrifice of a human being in order to attain some nefarious end.  This also circles back around to more Christian references (are you tired of them yet?).  The face of Kalghara (Germaine Simiens), Traigon’s bad deity, is half serpentine, a Satan reference.  The good deity, Vital (Vitara?  I couldn’t tell completely), is a winged, lion-esque creature.  In combination with the sacrificial element of the film, he and the twins symbolize the duology of Jesus, who was referred to at one point as both the “conquering Lion” and “the Lamb who was slain.”  These are not exactly straight lines I’m drawing between this picture and its biblical references (and I would be shocked as all hell if they were overtly intended, but I believe this is likely one of those times when themes and motifs appear unconsciously in a piece of work for any number of reasons).  After all, the film has to satisfy its generic requirements.  But they seemed pretty obvious to me (and I haven’t opened a Bible in decades).  Nevertheless, I don’t recall horny satyrs or horny ape creatures in the Bible, so I could be wrong about all of it.    

Sorceress has enough interesting things going on, at least from a visual angle to make it worth seeing.  Unfortunately, it’s also pretty slapdash in a lot of ways, and there are dollops of broad humor that make a pie in the face look like a Lenny Bruce monologue (an ape gets shot in the ass with an arrow, a troop of zombies molest a gaggle of vestal virgins to a “what can you do?” aside from Baldar).  This is the type of film wherein every character will believe absolutely anything they’re told.  Mara and Mira believe they are boys, despite the obvious physical differences (even if they had never seen a man in their entire lives, did they never notice or question the differences between their parents?), and don’t know quite what to make of Pando’s engorged penis (okay, that was actually kind of funny).  Worse, the other characters believe the twins are boys up until they disrobe in front of them.  No one is that naïve.  No one.  Traigon’s whole scheme calls for the virginal sacrifice of the first born of the twins but after she’s been impregnated (huh?!).  One of Traigon’s soldiers commands the girls be taken alive and then commands their deaths not even a minute later.  

Still and all, there are things to enjoy, as well (one could argue that the things I just mentioned are some of them).  You get a medieval set of nunchucks.  You get a decent amount of female nudity (and even some male butt).  But more than that, you get a movie that feels like a rollicking, carefree adventure, not so much because you’re glued to your seat following its progression in peaks and valleys, but because you can enjoy the gleefully madcap, thrown-in-a-blender nuttiness that occurs constantly throughout it.  Yes, Sorceress is a mud puddle of a film, but it’s a mud puddle that’s kind of fun to slop around in from time to time.

MVT:  John Carl Buechler’s creature and makeup effects are imaginative and skillfully done.

Make or Break:  Honestly, for this film I have to go with the skinnydipping scene.  It has a little nudity, a little creature effects work, and a little juvenile humor that just about works.  Something for everyone.

Score: 6/10

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

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)

When Tod Browning directed the brilliant Freaks (released in 1932, but shelved by MGM due to moral backlash more than anything, though it is readily available today), he accomplished two significant things (actually more, but for our purposes today, these two will suffice). One, he used real sideshow performers to portray the titular characters, horrifying audiences to the point of revulsion (and I believe the spectacle/exploitation angle was at least partly a conscious choice on Browning's behalf, though the opposite can also be argued). And two, he made the "monsters" the heroes of the piece, and the normal people (nigh-perfect physical specimens) are the beasts. Monsters (certainly the ones that have endured the longest) have often had some element of pathos to them, but never before (at least to my memory, but that's like Swiss cheese these days, so…) had viewers been asked to side with characters so antithetical to what they expected from their cinematic protagonists. Eventually (and some would say inevitably), the transgressive became the norm, and the heroic creature is as commonplace and accepted today as the hunky, all-American hero was then.

Dodger (MacKenzie Astin) is a skinny pantywaist who is beat up and robbed by stereotypical fiends, Juice, Wally, and Blythe (Ron MacLachlan, J.P. Amateau, and Marjory Graue, respectively). The problem is Dodger has the pubescent hots for Juice's squeeze, Tangerine(Katie Barberi, who was only Astin's elder by about a year but appears to be a good ten ahead of him), who sells her homemade clothes outside the local dance club and dreams of being a big time fashion designer. Dodger works for the loveably semi-absent-minded ex-magician, Captain Manzini (the late Anthony Newley), at the Captain's miserable antiques store. During an altercation between Dodger and Juice's gang, an (antique?) garbage pail is accidentally knocked over. Crawling out of the Slurpee-esque slime come seven broad gross out characters: Valerie Vomit (Debbie Lee Carrington, I assume voiced by Annie Wood), Windy Winston (Arturo Gil), Foul Phil (Robert Bell, voiced by Chloe Amateau), Nat Nerd (Larry Green, voice by Jim Cummings), Ali Gator (Kevin Thompson), Greaser Greg (Phil Fondacaro, voiced by Cummings again), and Messy Tessie (Susan Rossitto, voiced by Teri Benaron). Chaos is the order of the day, hilarity ensues, and we all learn a valuable lesson.

When the first credit on a film reads "A Topps Chewing Gum Production," sure as ten dimes buys you a dollar, you're in for a world of hurt. Fads have crossed over from their original forms into other media long before Rod Amateau's The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. The video game boom of the 1980s gave us such Saturday morning classics as "Saturday Supercade," "Q-Bert," and "The Legend Of Zelda." At that time, literally anything that had legs as a product for the ten to sixteen year old demographic spun off into multiple formats/forms. We had "Rubik The Amazing Cube" cartoons, Pac-Man breakfast cereal, Smurfs albums, and on, and on, and on. 

Around about 1983 or so, Cabbage Patch Dolls became THE toy for every girl to have. The furor over these products was so high, grown adults would have fist fights in store aisles trying to snag one for their child (but I'm sure this sort of thing no longer happens). In 1985, Topps released their first series of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards and stickers, parodying the cloying twee factor of Xavier Roberts's cherubic creations with grotesqueries and toilet humor, courtesy of the series' creator, Art Spiegelman. Needless to say, kids ate them up (including the razor sharp "chewing gum" included in every pack), parents hated them, and Topps executives cashed in.

What this film centers on, at least in theory, is Dodger's maturing into young adulthood and the ineluctable loss of romantic idealism brought upon by the harsh realities of the real world. The Kids serve two purposes, thematically. They serve as (supposedly) empathetic characters for the awkward, the abnormal, and the unattractive, as children just running headlong into puberty invariably feel, but they also represent those who are truly not the norm. On the other hand, they act as the anarchic id all kids revel in, because they flaunt the rules of normality. Unlike the dolls they were created to mock, the Garbage Pail Kids are dichotomous. They crave acceptance for what they are from society at large, yet their behavior is so unapologetically antisocial, the only ones who would have them are those who have "been there" or think they have (read: pubescent youth).

The depiction of The Kids, unfortunately, is resistant to any empathy a viewer may feel towards them. Nat Nerd literally pisses himself at least four times during the course of the film. Honestly, when you see this type of thing in reality, one's first reaction is not to laugh (unless the self-micturation is done as a deliberate act, instead of an involuntary reaction, but even then…really?). Windy Winston farts in people's faces with impunity. Ali Gator eats people's toes. All of them partake in grand larceny at one point or another. You get the idea. They go beyond merely being outcasts; they become alien, not just in their appearance, but in the audience's inability to reconcile the love/hate relationship their nature engenders. It's one thing to have friends who look odd or behave oddly. It's another thing if said friends persistently try to eat us, knife us, or slather mucus on us. Some things are simply not done, old bean.

This makes the film's message a trifle mixed. We get that the outwardly good-looking Juice and his gang are ugly on the inside. Conversely, The Kids, who should be the polar opposites of the antagonists, only distinguish themselves from them in their assistance of Dodger as a makeshift sweat shop for fashions that Tangerine uses to advance her own venal concerns. It can be safely stated that the filmmakers are trying to serve two masters with this film. They want us to fall for these oddballs, to look beyond the "warts" (and zits, and snot) to what lies beneath the surface. Meanwhile, they rejoice in shoving the audience's faces on the aforementioned "warts" and rubbing them up and down. There are only two characters worthy of the term "likeable" on any level. One is a sniveling, horny youngster. The other is a magician, nostalgist, and borderline child abuser who wants rid of The Kids, knowing they're nothing but trouble. And unless you're a diehard fan of John Carl Buechler's low budget animatronics (which are commendable considering the film's budget would probably make a shoestring look like a four lane highway), that's how you'll treat The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. Nothing but trouble.

MVT: Buechler's character creations have always had a charmingly threadbare appeal to them. The Kids are no different. The voices don't come close to matching the lip movements. The facial expressions are wildly broad and mostly inappropriate. But for makeup effects devotees, they're great to watch in action (despite their only slight effectiveness).

Make Or Break: The Kids break out in a musical number from out of the blue. You'll either savor it for its ridiculousness and inexplicable abruptness, or you'll roll your eyes and long to smash your face against the nearest piano like Don Music. I'm in the middle but leaning moderately towards the "Make" end of the equation. The rest of the movie? Not so much. 

Score: 4.75/10 

**Like this review?  Share it with a friend.  Hate it?  Share it with an enemy.**