The Wasp Woman (1995)

Directed by: Jim Wynors
Run Time: 84 minutes

Today's review is a remake of  Roger Corman's 1959 The Wasp Woman. Thought the lord of low budget B movies produced this one instead directing , it still has all the cheese one can expect of a B movie. Without further padding on to the review.

The story centers around Janice (Jennifer Rubin), a woman that created a successful cosmetics company, is the CEO of the company she made, and is the model of the product line. However declining sales and nervous investors are forcing her just to step down from being the company's model. Though not all hope is lost as Dr. Zinthorp has a plot convenient solution to Janice's age issue. Dr. Zinthorp, a disgraced medical researcher, has made a breakthrough in anti-aging by sciencing the  hell out of wasp stuff. He also is running low on research funds and is clueless on how to sell the research he has done so far.

This becomes painfully obvious when Janice meets Dr. Zinthorp in person and all he has as a presentation is a lot science jargon and no test results. Not wanting the next big thing in anti-aging to slip through her fingers Janice has Zinthorp test his serum on his cat. A few days later the cat reverts to a kitten and Janice wants to move to testing this serum on herself. A move that has nothing to do with the new young model that was hired to replace Janice. The doctor starts with a small dose to start the human testing phase of this serum. Though Janice may experience feelings of paranoia and have random hallucinations it will make her look younger in two or three months.

Playing it safe is not something Janice is willing to do and sneaks back into lab to increase her dosage.  This does have the effect of making her look like she is in her late twenties. It also makes her think that her boyfriend is romantically involved with other women and that she is turning into a human wasp monster. Back at Dr. Zinthorp's lab, the test kitty has mutated into a killer wasp cat. This monster cat then lures and kill Dr. Zinthorp in a near by service tunnel. Then is promptly forgotten.

Things get worse for Janice as well. Her paranoia has gone from annoying to dialed past eleven. She also starts seducing men that called her old, trying to destroy her business, and who betrayed her trust. This leads to her turning into a human wasp monster with bad nineties CGI effects. Followed by tame but horrific murder of the people in question. The third act see Janice sort of embracing her monstrous nature and forcing a final conflict between herself and the few surviving people left in her life.

At of the end of the day it's fun cheesy monster movie made for cable. Because it was made in the nineties for cable so there is more nudity and the killing is more graphic than the 1959 edition. There is not a lot to this movie outside of it being a fun monster movie. It's a fun movie if there is nothing on, the weather outside is crappy, or you can't sleep. If it shows up on cable or a streaming service give it a watch.

MVT: The monster suit is rather impressive for a low budget production like this.

Make or Break: Every time there was a office scene the background sound track included a nonstop ringing phone. At times it got on my nerves to the point I did yell out "Answer the fucking phone already."

Score: 5.9 out of 10

 

Crystalbrain (1970)

Sir Cliffton Reynolds (or maybe Reynold Cliffton according to the subtitles I had, but either way he’s played by Eduardo Fajardo) is a London judge plagued with intense headaches of late.  Dr. Chalmers (Frank Wolff) tells Cliff that he has about six months left to live, but the good doctor also has a possible solution.  Chalmers suggests that what Cliff needs is a new brain, comparing his proposed procedure to the transplanting of primate hearts into humans.  Cue Ginetto Lamberti (Simón Andreu), a working man who currently lies dying in the street, but whose brain is in perfect (this is subjective) working order.  But will this transplant prove to be a transmigration of Ginetto’s soul, or just an excuse for Cliff to go insane?

Juan Logar’s Crystalbrain (aka L’uomo Dal Cervello Di Cristallo aka Trasplante De Un Cerebro) is an amalgamation of genres.  It owes as much to gialli as it does to science fiction, as it does to psychothrillers, as it does to horror.  What it harks back specifically to, however, is the classic The Hands of Orlac and its profligate progeny.  The earlier story concerns a pianist who has the hands of a murderer grafted onto his arms, and the “influence” the hands begin to exert on his psyche.  This conceit, that a foreign body part introduced onto/into a “normal” person having a deleterious effect, is an intriguing one.  It plays both as a straight horror paradigm and as an investigation of pure human nature.  Most people like to think that they are, at heart, good.  But what if you were given an excuse to unleash your id, to behave in a way antithetical to your public personality?  Characters in these types of stories believe so deeply that their transplants have power, they allow their personae to transform, and rarely for the better.  Their darkest aspects rise to the forefront.  Many times, they become obsessed with discovering why their transplant died or with taking revenge on those who killed them.  Who, then, is the true personality?  The one who existed before the operation or the one who was created afterward?  Was one just masking the other?  Cliff appears to be a decent person before his procedure.  He believes that “justice balances right and wrong.”  He loves his wife Susan (Nuria Torray) and his brother Peter (Angel del Pozo).  While he doesn’t turn evil after the transplant, Cliff certainly becomes more than a little unhinged.  One way to look at the ensuing events in his life is that his sense of morality intensifies and drives him to find closure in the name of Ginetto by appropriating the Italian fisherman’s psyche.

In this same way, there is the notion that transplants actually do have power over the transplantee.  In these cases, the fantastic element raises issues of identity and loss of same, perhaps even more than looking at it through a purely psychological lens.  The introduction of organs not our own suggests an invasion of our body (in fact, that’s exactly what it is), an attack on who we are.  The invader is usually malignant in nature and more powerful than the host body.  The transplant typically proceeds in wreaking havoc on the transplantee’s life and loved ones, and there is nothing the weaker of the two can do because, through the process of the transplant, they are, by definition, no longer wholly themselves.  Their identity is no longer their own because their bodies are no longer their own, strictly speaking.  In Crystalbrain, this idea is a bit easier to believe because the human brain is the whole of our conscious being.  Our hands may be adept at a certain skill, but that’s because our mind has trained them to be so.  Naturally, this trope also implies in some way that muscle memory goes further than being the unconscious ability to perform constantly repeated tasks.  Here, pieces of the donor contain the active personality (or aspects of the personality) of the donor.  The transplantee, being in a weakened state, is possessed through these parts.  It’s a bit like The Thing in that every piece of a donor contains the whole of him/herself.  

We, as an audience, may or may not buy any of this under normal circumstances.  A hand or a kidney is truly nothing more than a machine (or a part of a machine) without a power source.  Nonetheless, the big question that comes up in this film is how does Chalmers not consider that Cliff’s personality would be completely changed by his operation?  When questioned about this (“Do you think it’s morally responsible to destroy a soul to heal a body?”), he simply states that doctors have to stave off death whenever they can.  But he’s not saving Cliff’s life.  If anything, he’s saving Ginetto’s life by giving him Cliff’s body.  What the hell kind of medical professional do you have to be to not understand that?  The only way to explain it is that Chalmers believes that our psyche (or here, our “soul”) resides in our whole body, not just in our skulls (and he’s supposedly a man of science).  Frankly, he never should have been given a medical license, but what can you do?  

Logar and company deal with the disparate personalities of Cliff and Ginetto in a stylistically interesting way.  During Cliff’s surgery, he flashes back to the many people on whom he has passed judgment, and they each appear in double exposure alongside Cliff as he pronounces sentence.  They are voiceless; Cliff is in power, and his sense of justice is secure.  Later, when Cliff visits the cemetery where Ginetto’s body is buried, he envisions a series of people who are directly in his and Ginetto’s lives (Chalmers, Susan, Ginetto himself, et cetera), again in double exposure, and they all call out to him.  They are now tormenting Cliff.  He is no longer in control of his life or his being, but justice must still be served.  The duality of Cliff and Ginetto is tied together in this simple way, and I felt it was fairly successful.  

The editing of the film is also fragmented.  Time and space change in a heartbeat with little to no establishment of what’s going on or when these events take place.  Like the Crystalbrain of the title, not only is Cliff’s mind fragile, ready to be shattered, but the cinematic world these characters inhabit is equally splintered.  It’s an off-kilter approach, and it reflects what Cliff is going through.  He’s uncertain of who he is (right up until he’s certain, yet even then…).  His mind is unreliable, and the film’s construction is equally untrustworthy (although, as with so many foreign films of this ilk and time period, we can’t be completely certain how many editors’ hands this passed through), forcing us to fill in blanks and play catch up; essentially placing us in the protagonist’s shoes to some small degree or another.  Admittedly, the film is headscratching in its logic, and Cliff acts in a manner easy to disbelieve, even with all that’s happening to him.  It treats its supporting characters like props more than people, and I think this robs the film of the impact it may have had.  Even at eighty-five minutes, the story is not particularly well-paced, either.  And yet, it stands out among its peers, even if only as a curiosity rather than a revelation.

MVT:  The approach to the narrative is distinctive and interesting, and I would guess that the filmmakers at least tried to tell their story in a unique fashion.

Make or Break:  The scene in the cemetery, where Cliff (or Ginetto, depending on your perspective) hallucinates (or does he?).

Score:  6.5/10    

Inseminoid (1981)

**SPOILERS**

Some random thoughts/quandaries/gripes for you today.  Why is there never a poster or picture frame manufactured in the size that I need (you would think they would understand that some prints are not  “standard” size; of course, this also helps keep framers in business, but still…)?  Why does Hollywood keep insisting on using CG for absolutely everything, even though it certainly hasn’t driven production costs down and nine-out-of-ten times looks like garbage?  Are “goth” kids the new preppies?  I am horrible at choosing gifts for people.  Horrible.  The reason I don’t have my dream job is because I have too many things I love, none of which I have ever successfully monetized (you’re reading one of them now).  I wonder what will happen to my collection of comics and magazines after I’m dead?  Would they even be worth the price of the paper they’re printed on?  Why couldn’t I have been born rich instead of so good-looking?  Why do people think that walking directly out in front of my car will make it instantly stop?  As a side note, are there more people out there with bodies as dense and tough as steel than I thought?  Are Wal-Marts nexuses of surreal freakishness which are slowly expanding outward in concentric circles, like a rock chucked into a sea of primordial soup (that some jerk dipped his nuts in)?  Why do people enjoy watching “reality shows” that have the same exact “story” and the same exact interactions every single week (and this is coming from someone who has a close relationship with formulaic storytelling)?  

Why all this scattershot navel-gazing in this week’s intro?  Well, because Norman J Warren’s Inseminoid (aka Horror Planet) is a film loaded to the gills with random idiocy.  To wit: Dean (Dominic Jephcott) picks up some weird crystals by hand without using tongs or anything.  The love scene between Mark (Robin Clarke) and Sandy (Judy Geeson) involves them getting naked and hugging while standing upright.  Documentation Officer, Kate (Stephanie Beacham) interviews various crew members like she were a cub reporter (microcassette recorder and all).  She also has no compunction about killing her colleagues when it’s deemed necessary and then kicking back in her underwear while listening to her jams (maybe it’s whale songs or somesuch; who knows?) on her large earphones.  The most expedient way to deal with the major problem at hand is determined to be killing Sandy with explosives.  Doctor Karl (Barrie Houghton) doesn’t want to kill Sandy because she’s pregnant (something about which Mark seemingly has no opinion whatsoever, even though he has no clue whether he’s the father or not).  The crew watches Gail (Rosalind Lloyd) kill herself by opening up her space suit helmet and trying to saw off her leg rather than any of them donning a suit and going out to, you know, help her or something.  Holly (Jennifer Ashley) wields the intimidating “touch burner” (basically a tack welder… in space!) right next to Karl’s head as he wrestles with Sandy (surely, nothing could go wrong here).  You can accuse this film of being dumb (and, let’s face it, it is), but it’s dumb in such arbitrary ways, it creates a certain charm that makes it enjoyable.

The idea of monstrous impregnation rears its head in Inseminoid, and while this is a wholly unoriginal idea (see The Beast Within, Rosemary’s Baby, Demon Seed, ad nauseum), it clearly comes directly from Alien’s face hugger concept.  It does, however, have a couple of twists to it that make it seem a little fresher than it actually may be.  The impregnation process is both creepy and clinical in its depiction.  Sandy is strapped naked to a glowing (metal?) disco table.  The alien inserts his (glass?) penis-thing into her, and we watch as its eggs flow down the tube and into Sandy.  This plays simultaneously on the fear of rape and the fear of medical procedures, which are equivocated here as being invasive and assaultive.  Further, this pregnancy changes Sandy fundamentally, something that many films utilizing this plot point don’t do (they usually deal more with the human angle of the mother dealing melodramatically with the tragic circumstances in which she finds herself, and in Ridley Scott’s film, Kane [John Hurt] doesn’t even know something is wrong until it suddenly, violently, is).  She goes from being a mild-mannered non-entity (in a film whose every character is a non-entity) to a murderous, ghoulish non-entity (she eats a victim to feed her babies).  This riffs on some of the old wives’ tales that revolve around pregnancy, as well as amplifying some of the actualities.  For example, the changes in hormones that come with being pregnant can cause mood swings and/or odd cravings (entrails, for example).  Likewise, there is the myth that female infants steal their mother’s looks (Geeson distorts her face and gurns constantly, and her bulging green eyes are heavily emphasized).  These changes to Sandy can also be viewed as the intensification of a mother’s protective instincts toward her unborn children as well as phobias about the “other” growing in her womb.  Sure, she goes crazy and starts killing off cast members all willy-nilly, but she does it to keep her spawn safe while being equally terrified of what’s transpiring to her body. 

One intriguing aspect of the film which is almost entirely abandoned after being initially brought up is the idea of twins and myths.  The space crew are archaeologists excavating an alien planet, and some of the space hieroglyphics discovered tell, according to linguist (?) Mitch (Trevor Thomas), of mythical twins who once ruled the planet.  It’s postulated that this fixation may have come from the planet’s dual suns.  It’s also speculated that the planet’s previous inhabitants were self-destructive (of course, this is solely put out there to play into the film’s horror narrative).  But the idea of twins goes totally unexplored, until the twin aliens are born in the film’s third act (you can view their conception as occurring between a god and a mortal, a scenario with which mythology is rife).  There is no depth given to what could have been a complex (without being complicated) concept of duality.  These two are not Romulus and Remus.  They are not Cassandra and Helenus.  Hell, they’re not even Tomax and Xamot.  Inseminoid’s xeno-babies are strictly used like the infants from the It’s Alive series (and please don’t ever confuse the Larry Cohen film with the identically-titled Larry Buchanan film in that regard, because they are worlds apart), but even in the latter movies the creatures had a modicum of personality.  Sandy’s children are gruesome, vicious hand puppets that are in the film for exactly three reasons.  One, they embody the fears of motherhood.  Two, they give the film an un-shocking “shock” ending.  And three, they raise the body count by a couple of corpses.  In a film which is simple to the point of being simplistic, you really can’t expect much more, though, can you?

MVT:  Inseminoid has a sleazy, eerie atmosphere about it that augments its bleak outlook.  It also looks damned slick for a film made on a shoestring.

Make or Break:  As obvious (and mayhap just a bit crass) as it may be to name it, the Make on this one is the alien rape/impregnation scene.  It’s visually striking while still being pretty freaky in its own right.

Score:  6.75/10 

Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (1968)

One of the more intriguing programs that appeared on Nickelodeon back in the Eighties (aside from the obvious You Can’t Do That On Television) was a little gem dubbed The Third Eye.  It was a series of mini-series which I believe were produced in either New Zealand or Australia (I could be wrong, so an apology if that’s not the case).  Each story centered on a psychically gifted child or children and the dangers they come across/adventures upon which they embark, but all with a dark bent.  Out of the five stories aired, the two I remember anything about are The Haunting Of Cassie Palmer, about a girl who befriends a ghost (who, if memory serves, was dressed a lot like a Puritan) and Under The Mountain, about a couple of kids who go up against slimy monsters reminiscent of the Axons from the childhood-scarring Doctor Who story The Claws Of Axos (i.e. composed of so many intermingling tentacles it could almost be a gestalt creature made out of giant, pink slugs; the sweet spot for a monster kid who was forever searching for the next scare).  The Third Eye is one of those shows about which very little is mentioned these days (at least within earshot of me), and I don’t think that any of the episodes ever hit DVD in North America (again, if they did they remain well out of my line of vision).  I know Under The Mountain was remade a few years back, but I haven’t seen it, and my guess would be it’s far slicker than the low-fi series I first encountered in my youth (not that this is a judgment, mind you).  I bring this up as a tangent (par for the course for me) to an aspect of Hajime Sato’ s Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (aka Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro) I will get to in just a couple of short paragraphs.  Care to take a guess as to what it is?    

An Air Japan flight streaks through a blood red sky.  The various passengers, including a politician, his sycophant and the sycophant’s wife, a grieving widow, a psychologist, a teenaged punk, a man dressed almost exclusively in white (right down to the gloves), and a space biologist (yes, really), all pontificate the meaning of this ominous portent, as well as the fact that the whole world is basically going to hell in a hand basket (most likely shaped like an Air Japan jet in this case).  Birds smack violently into the plane’s windows, and after a glowing UFO buzzes past, one of the engines explodes, sending the aircraft down in parts unknown.  But surviving the elements and being rescued are the least of these folks’ obstacles, as they are all about to find out the hard way.

Goke is, to put it mildly, one of the most unusual anti-war films you may ever come across.  But it’s not the message that makes it stand out so much as the messenger.  There have been anti-war films almost as long as there has been cinema, and Sato uses some interesting visual techniques to hammer the point home.  For example, widow Mrs. Neal (Cathy Horan) carries a crucifix and a photo of her deceased husband in her luggage.  This photo, however, is not of Mr. Neal in his civilian life or even of him and his wife showing the bonds of their marriage.  No, the pic is of him in uniform over in Vietnam holding a puppy.   In other words, she remembers him as a dead soldier more than as a loving life partner (the puppy is an indicator of his good nature and the senselessness of his death).  After co-pilot Sugisaka (Teruo Yoshida) is shot in the arm, his blood drips down onto this same photo, staining it with a reminder that violence begets violence.  There are multiple montages in the film utilizing some horrific images from real war footage, all tinted red (of course symbolizing blood again), for the purpose of shocking us (assumedly back to our collective senses).  But aside from these things, and the bald-faced philosophizing most of the characters trudge through (and which we expect from such fare), it is the most basic aspects of the plot which are oddest.  The Gokemidoro (the alien race piloting the UFO) came to Earth to conquer it and exterminate humanity.  Naturally, what better time to do so then when we humans are so busy killing ourselves, we are at our most vulnerable to this sort of attack?  And that’s just it.  It’s not just that we should end all wars because humans are killing humans (well, it is as a byproduct, I think), but because if we don’t, we may be killed by invading extraterrestrials (or whichever force for Evil you’d like) who can take advantage of our disunity.  

This brings me back to a discussion of the third eye (the concept, not the television series this time).  If you’ve seen stills from this film, I would hazard a guess that most likely they were of Hideo Ko as Hirofumi, the man in white.  After the plane crashes and he escapes with a hostage (stewardess Asakura, played by Tomomi Sato), he comes upon the incandescent UFO and is mesmerized.  Once inside the saucer, his forehead splits open, allowing the Gokemidoro to enter and take over his body.  From a perspective of spiritualism, the third eye symbolizes enlightenment.  It is supposed to be a way of seeing beyond normal human comprehension, of seeing the truth.  Normally, this is represented in the arts as a form of inner peace.  Yet again, the filmmakers here take an expectation and turn it on its ear.  Hirofumi was already a man of violence.  It is intimated that he shot an ambassador a day or so before the events of this story unfold.  He carries acid (and a rifle) in his suitcase.  Nevertheless, once he is bequeathed with a third eye, he does not become a man of peace.  Instead, he becomes a genuine monster, a space vampire.  Hirofumi and the aliens don’t bring harmony but devastation.  Conversely, it can be argued that this is the ultimate truth, not only of human beings, but of all lifeforms; destruction is the order of the universe.  It cannot be escaped on this planet nor on any other. In the long run, it makes for one of the most pessimistic pacifist films I have ever seen, because it doesn’t matter whether or not the people of Earth abolish war.  Apparently, there are entire universes of races out there just chomping at the bit to decimate us.  Doing it ourselves simply speeds the plow.

MVT:  I love the main idea of this film.  If nothing else can be said about it, it is unique and loaded with imagination.  The film’s structure does bog the pacing down a bit by going the formulaic route, but the ending puts a final and fitting bit of punctuation to the proceedings.

Make or Break:  The first sequence inside the Gokemidoro ship is the Make.  Aside from the repulsive special effects, the interior of the craft contains aspects of both order and chaos (rectangular frames formed with jagged edges, kaleidoscopic lighting schemes, et cetera) I find appealing for its creation of a sort of visual tension.

Score:  7/10