René Cardona Jr.’s TINTOREARA is an awe-inspiring mess of terribleness. Billed as a horror film / JAWS rip-off, it accomplishes only knuckle-dragging problematic machismo among a nonsense backdrop of the permissive party culture of the late 70s.
Briefly, here is what happens: Two American girls accept a ride with two Mexican orange farmers. The girls are sorta raped. An American woman falls in love with Mustache Jerk. They break up. She moves on to Gigolo Man. Then she is eaten by the shark.
Meanwhile, thinking the American woman left on an airplane, Mustache Jerk and Gigolo Man become friends so they can make it with more women. They go spear fishing and kill a lot of sharks.
A British Lady shows up and tames the Mustache Jerk and Gigolo Man into a weird no love three way affair. While showing off to the British Bird, Gigolo Jerk is eaten by the shark.
British Bird flies away because Mustache Jerk is, well, a jerk. In order to forget the loss of his bestie and his best girl, Mustache Jerk goes to a weird beach party. The two American Girls are there. They all go skinny dipping. One of the two American girls is eaten by the shark.
Mustache Jerk makes it his life mission to hunt and kill the shark. He is eaten by the shark.
FIN.
I mean, what the hell did I just watch? It was part bad softcore porn, but without the sex. It was kinda animal Faces of Death. It was kinda just stupid and boring and there was no excitement nor drama. It was incredibly strange.
I give it two scuba bubbles out of 100 scuba bubbles because I think the shark ate everyone in the movie.
MANDY is a rare Nicolas Cage movie, meaning that Cage has few lines and scant opportunity to chew the scenery. Cage exudes a cosmic overacting.
Instead of exploiting Cage’s energy to make a cinematic fool of himself, MANDY exploits his uncanny presence. Bathed in pink hues and painted in blood, Cage throws his body into this movie with a muted insanity. His character’s power comes from an infusion of rage, insane grief, and revenge. All conveyed as much by Cage’s past performances as the one we watch.
Therein is hidden the key to MANDY. Everyone reviewing the movie seems intent upon using the words “fever dream” or “hallucinogenic nightmare” as a lazy way to describe the skewed visuals and off-kilter collage of styles. While no one points out that feeling is created, in part, because the movie is 100% referential to other horror films.
Each scene hints at a familiar visual source, nothing is original. By stitching together a bastard monster from a 1000 corpses, Panos Cosmatos jr. recreates the frightfulness of the horror genre. He manages to create a visual presence – a nauseating experience of dreadful associations very much like a real nightmare.
For instance, Cosmatos’ makes visual references to HELLRAISER, EVIL DEAD 2, THE DESCENT, THE CELL, RAISING ARIZONA, GHOULIES, PSYCHOMANIA, HEAVY METAL, HE-MAN, THE SHINING to name a few. With direct scenes of the movie – especially the dueling chainsaws reworking famous scenes from TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 and PHANTASM II – completely lifted from their sources.
In addition to horror references, Cosmatos’ laced his film with the tension between music fans that defined the 1980s culture wars. Fan bases reached near cult-like fanaticism as metal heads hated hippies and hippies hated Jesus-freak rockers. Mandy wears BLACK SABBATH and MOTLEY CRUE (Shout at the Devil) t-shirts, while Jeremiah Sand is a failed hippie folk rock star god.
It is a commentary on musical taste and rivalry AND male fragility that Mandy’s laughter at Sand’s song is the catalyst for violence. And when Red goes on his rampage he forges a weapon that resembles the CELTIC FROST logo.
The final thing I thought about the movie is that it would be possible to construct a whole theory around the fact that Red does not recover from the stab wound nor never frees himself from the barbed wire. Instead, everything that follows that scene exists in the dying fancy of a broken man.
I guess MANDY has a cult following already – Cheddar Goblin and other custom action figures are in collector’s hoards – and is an incredibly polarizing movie. It makes sense. It is completely and utterly visually frustrating – like a hangnail you can’t stop working back and forth. Painfully satisfying.
When you throw one motherfucker at another motherfucker.
René Cardona Jr.’s GUNS & GUTS is a fine entry into the weird pseudo-Spaghetti Western genre.
For one thing, the movie begins with an nine minute, nearly dialogue-free rampage of a bearded escaped convict (aptly named only Prisionero Escapado!) . We follow along as he seems to randomly assault store owners. With each beating Prisionero Escapado delivers, he wins a new fetish object – from one a gun, another a hat, and the third a coat – so by the time he lands at the inn, he is a fully functioning nameless gunfighter ready for revenge.
Waiting for Prisionero Escapado the next morning is Esposo Abandonado. This second cowboy bears an uncanny resemblance to the other. In fact, in some of the scenes, where I was barely paying attention, I failed to discern which was which and for the most part, it didn’t really matter. Since they were both searching for the same Bastard. In order to kill him.
Barba Escapado and Barba Abandonado meet up with the man in black otherwise known only as, lets call him – Putañero Pistolero – since he loves the brothel ladies a little too much. In fact, the movie dips into rare Spaghetti Western territory – female nudity. Mostly in a prolonged and otherwise pointless scene of strip poker. Or at least it seems like that is what is going on…
Anyway, by the time the double cross becomes a triple cross the movie has stopped caring about plot, really. Instead it lumbers toward a straight up rip off of THE WILD BUNCH including the Gatling guns and slow motion exploding squibs. Except where THE WILD BUNCH has artistry and finesse, GUNS & GUTS has noise and bad aim. The ante though, is upped by Barba Abandonado machine gunning down his ex-wife. So that is something new.
Overall, this is a solid performer in the genre and adds a couple nice flourishes to its presentation.
I feel that there is a direct relationship between how awful a movie will be and the length and quality of its opening credits. Take THE WORM EATERS. The movie’s credits float over felt tip marker drawings of worms re-enacting pivotal upcoming scenes, all while an off-key summer camp chorus yodels “No body like me (Guess I’ll Go Eat Worms).” Its an agonizing 2 minutes and 50 seconds.
Umgar conversing with his worm pals.
Much like RETURN OF THE JEDI, this movie begins with belching idiots, which should alert you to the rest of the movie’s bludgeoning sense of “humor.” But that implies that anything works in THE WORM EATERS. It does not.
All the actors are yelling their lines, more likely because of cheap microphones than creative decisions. Plus most of the scenes are shot outside, I suspect they invented “outdoor for indoor” which is like “day for night,” but with cardboard and bed sheet walls instead of a camera filter.
The plot can be summed up as: A clubfooted mumbling asshole turns most of the rest of the cast in WORM-men and WORM-women. How and why isn’t clear. Nor does it matter. There might be a subplot about land developing, missing fishermen, and some posh campers wanting breakfast. The bad guys might be Klansmen, too, it was hard to say.
THE WORM EATERS real reason for being, though, is the super-gross out close-ups of people eating worms.
Projected on a big screen these extreme close ups of pre-orthodontic mouths noisily chomping down on hot dogs, pasta, and ice cream full of squirmy wormies is meant to be amazingly disturbing and vomit inducing. This sort of gross out exploitation enjoys a fine and storied history among the stoned midnight movie crowd which no longer exists in cinemas. Rather today the connoisseur of gross may watch endless hours of blackhead extractions or World Star fistfights at the click of a mouse.
Avoid this one, I would say, because the accents are more offensive than the worm eating. That and all the yelling.
I wanted to see The Laughing Policeman because I heard there were scenes shot around my old San Francisco neighborhood of Japantown / Western Addition. And I was not disappointed, there is a rather violent police standoff with a deranged machine gunner right by the corner I passed everyday while walking my dog. So yeah, coooool. Seeing San Francisco in the early 1970s was amazing – the first thing I noticed was how few trees there were!
The movie, itself, starts off amazingly. There is a realism present that movies have simply abandoned sometime in the 1990s. A realism of actors talking over each other with work-a-day conversations, a documentary sensibility that allows the viewer to submerge into the scene, as if we were part of it.
In addition, actors were not all perfect pressed suits and flawless makeup. Actors allowed close ups that featured beads of sweat that dripped down pock-marked cheeks and from the wrinkles of furrowed brows. Clothes looked lived in, stained, and occasionally wrinkled with awful odors.
Overall, this movie is a tour de force for Walter Mattau’s gum chewing and Bruce Dern annoying voice. The first half is amazingly good as a snapshot of the mundane work of police. And the team of detectives is a rogues’ gallery of amazing character actors from the 70s.
But immediately after we are treated to a pimp slapping scene and then a scene of police brutality (Mattau slapping Kathy Lee Crosby for posing for nude pictures, I guess), the movie spirals into nonsense. A cold case is linked to the current case, a boring realtor is boringly trailed, and we no longer get the ensemble cast that populated the first half of the movie.
There is a conservative tinge to the second half as well. Following in the lead foot kicking DIRTY HARRY treated audiences to in 1971, THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN makes a plea that police work can only work extra-legally. Justice is all street and without Miranda Rights. A cranky and malcontent ending to what began as a nuanced exhibit of police work.
The last of Hammer’s Mummy films feels less and less like a Mummy movie the more I think about it. Not that I am thinking about it too much, really.
Based on Bram Stoker’s novel Jewel of the Seven Stars, this movie involves not so much of a mummy’s ancient curse, as it does the tired old Modernist/Spiritualist Experiment to bring down the floating, ancient One. That star child who has traveled centuries to usher in a time of new morality, that “beyond good and evil” gobbedlygook. Its a bit of a muddled mess, those reasons, but as an engine for the action it is as good as any. At least we are spared the undying love hoopla of most Mummy Tales.
The fact that the Mummy, in this case, is a perfectly perserved priestess, undermines the whole Mummyness…But the fact that the ancient priestess is played by a nearly nude Valerie Leon, I suppose we can, erm, overlook this?
The whole plot revolves around reincarnation. Leon plays a woman who died at birth but was brought back to life by this Mummy Spirit. How the stars have all aligned, like they were when Princess Mummy was alive, and there is something about four tomb objects that need to be collected from the various members of the expedition that uncovered the ancient tomb in modern times.
There is something, also, about a chopped off hand, a big red ring, and screaming that causes car crashes. Oh which reminds me, Leon’s boyfriend’s name is Tod Browning. Henyh.
The procurement of these tomb talisman makes for the bulk of the gore and horror. Standard fare, really, petrified old archeologists attacked by invisible cats, shadow snakes, and laughing hyenas. All their deaths presaged by howling, blustery winds and darkened sky thunder claps. There is the straight jacketed loony tune, a dithering professor type with a young buxom secretary, the freaky psychic, and the long over-coated cane carrier, who slicks his hair back with greasy evil.
At the center of all this is Valerie Leon, usually tossing and turning with bad dreams, her lacy nightie heaving. Or there is Valerie Leon running through the underbrush in a wispy nightgown, her basooombas bouncing in the slow motion trot. Or there is Valerie Leon emerging from the shadows to stare with her icy cold eyes at some doomed old person.
Why she needs to show up is sort of a mystery, since she is never there for the throat gouging kills, nor does she retrieve the talisman to take it back to the basement tomb. Its strange and somewhat mysterious, actually.
Not now, I am busy.
Still the movie was great fun to watch, in part, because Leon is by turn wooden and engaging. The camera likes her, but does not love her, so there is a slight awkwardness to each scene. It is as if she got all the action ques a few seconds after all the other actors.
The ending is a nice visual joke which I think purposefully pokes fun at the lack of the traditional mummy in this mummy flick. Overall, good show.
Starlight Hotel. Roberta Collins briefly checks in.
EATEN ALIVE is a totally mean-spirited movie from Tobe Hooper. It is mean to hooers, little dogs, children, teenagers, Crocodiles, the mentally ill, and most of all Judds.
Stylistically, it is a masterpiece of closed sets and flooded lighting. The soundtrack is a barrage of mumbling hums and bug gurgles, and muted screaming. Not to mention the screeching country and western music (sadistically composed by Hooper and Wayne Bell) annoying piped in from the constantly playing radio. The duo collaborated on the a similar auditory assault for TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE.
Every single character in this one is some how tweaking on something and the whole movie simply sweats! Neville Brand, as hotelier Judd, is a monstrous masterpiece of literal scene chewing. He slouches, he freaks, he pulls it together on the edge of the couch all with a subtle muttering chaos. Brand’s performance is so good that it should place this creep in the pantheon of famous backwoods jerks.
Plus, we get the tripping balls performance of William Finley who’s fraternal freakout is one of the ickiest moments in the flick. But if you do not want to slog through the whole 90 minutes, just youtube the bits with Miss Hattie, played by Carolyn Jones – the Addams Family’s Morticia – looking disturbingly saggy in a latex mask.
And this is not even mentioning the buff swagger of Robert Englund who’s butt sex obsessed Buck is like a template on which Matthew McConaughey built a career!
the story is simple enough and the rationale is completely nonexistent, which only plays into the insanity of the action. The young child in danger provides some real 1970s emotional weight to the otherwise bonkers randomness of the violence. It is enough to understand that Judd has himself a crocodile. And that crocodile is always hungry. Sprinkle with a sickle and leisure suits and you got yourself an excuse to have a madman bursting through doorways and swinging manically at young nubile girls.
Ah, Umberto Lenzi. What a terrible mess you have made of this movie. Or maybe it is not your fault. But most likely it was your fault, since you want to take credit for rewriting the story. Not to mention inventing the whole giallo genre.
Wake Up Barbara
Actually, SPASMO is a great idea. A cross between a surrealist reworking of LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH and a weird mediation on the unstable world of a serial killer.
SPASMO’s world is one where the characters have a tenuous grasp on reality and the film gleefully plays on that with disjointed conversations and off kilter staging. Plus there is the weird inclusion of the quick shots of variously posed mannequins, but more on that in a moment.
SPASMO centers on a hammy playboy named Christian, a typical tight-suited unbuttoned smooth chested skinny; the type of European pretty boy who skids along these giallos, failing and sometimes saving the day. Overplayed by Robert Hoffman, Christian is possibly tormented, possibly suggestible stooge. Does he have a dark secret or is he a victim of a loony conspiracy? Seems both, actually.
In one of the films defining moments, Christian who might have just picked up a prostitute named Barbara, earnestly played through sweaty makeup by Suzy Kendall (To Sir with Love & Argento’s Girl With the Crystal Plumage). She has a demanding pimp/boyfriend who lounges on the side of the frame projecting greasy threatening threats.
But it is Barbara who is the real threat. She demands that before they make it together, Christian must shave off his beard. He does so with little protest, which could be read several ways. The most obvious is that Christian has been unmasked. He turns the corner, stripped of his protective mask, he enters a maze of psychological disruption. Nothing is what it seems and he is nakedly unprotected.
Beardlessness might, also, set the viewer up for a bait and switch. A MacGuffin, of sorts, where Christian is being set up to look like someone he is not. Possibly a twin? Or another sort of doppelganger? Both are the sorts of absolute left turn twists offered by these giallos. Of course, it should come a no surprise that Christian isn’t what he looks like. He IS a sick serial killer, not the gently confused hero of some sinister plot.
Mannequins in the Woods
The only other effective aspect of SPASMO is the quick cuts to the disrobed and anatomically correct mannequins. Elaborately staged like violent crime scenes, the few times actual people discover the life sized dolls, the make out lovers or the gardeners, these people are shocked then confused. These quick shots befuddle the viewer, as well. They might be disconnected hallucinations of an off screen killer. They might be stand in dislocations for actual crime scenes, actual murders seen as grotesque objet d’art, posed as the disturbed killer sees them? They seem to be cast as key pieces in the film’s psychological puzzle.
Of course, there are other hints at a better movie that might have been filmed. The unfamiliar familiarity of the old man and his provocative red haired companion who materialize out of the night only to know more than they possibly could know. There is the windy scenery of the tower, under lit and creepy. There is the nefarious bother lurking in a well to do office taking phone calls. Then there is that stupid home movie.
I must say something about that home movie. In the film’s pivotal confrontation between the brothers, a scene that should reveal the psychological impetus of the horror, the film totally fumbles the ball. The home movie, showing two little boys ominously staring at the camera, close up of mental institution needles and equipment, and a somber birthday party , all play laughably incoherent. Nothing is revealed.
In fact, the film and confrontation is so ineffective, the movie needs to explain itself in a phone message. Much like the doctor’s speech at the end of PSYCHO, this message explains the whole movie in a few brief sentences. Stupidly as well.
SPASMO tries to be innovative and introduce some subtly into the over the top violent gore of the giallo. BUT. It fails. The failure is mainly built into the structure of the narrative. In order to strip the genre of its tent poles, Lenzi casts aside all suspense or coherency of danger. Since we are never shown that murders have actually be committed, the fact that they have been comes as an “oh okay” moment. The fact that there are no police bumbling around, removes the audience’s only guide through the off screen action. Etc.
Had Lenzi been a better writer or maybe had a better cinematic vocabulary, SPASMO might have proved to be an effectively strange film of psychological horror. As it exists, it is a bit of a strange mess.
Dario Argento returns to the murderous nature of art and music in SLEEPLESS where a haunted musical instrument serial killer returns after years of silence. Max von Sydow shuffles through his scenes with an over-aged bumble. While excellently filling out the faulty memory of the retired inspector who first tracked the case, he has little to do and the pain of his affliction is inconsistently displayed. He remembers, then he doesn’t, its a flaw in the scripting more than anything else.
The Dwarf Killer is on the loose again, killing with cut out farm animals and using silly contrapasso means of dispatch. There are some fairly effective scenes of tension and gruesomeness, but the gore is fairly light. Plus the sheer meanness of the killer is not as pronounced. Which might have something to do with the fact that Asia Argento is played by Chiara Caselli, in this one.
The lighting is not as richly artificial as other, more effectively disconcerting, Argento pictures. Nor are there many of the off-putting out of reality rooms or other spaces that establish so much of the nightmare dread. SLEEPLESS happens too much in the real world, which makes the problems with the plot and time line all the more glaring. Still, the loose ends and red herrings aside, we have seen this solution a few other times in giallos, but it is a pretty good reveal in this one too.
Overall, I would recommend this a a fine giallo, but a mediocre Argento, easily skipped over.
Canker upon canker upon one million tiny punctures
What starts out as a wonderful sister’s holiday, ends with a hotel held hostage to a sex manic pyschokiller!
Or something.
Because there is clearly maybe a ghost story, a double cross drug plot, and a romantic love triangle/story! All subplots that, ultimately, go no where. But the seaside hotel it all happens at provides some wonderful outdoor shots, especially when the wind kicks up and all the actors start to shiver.
THE SISTER OF URSULA is more soft core skin flix than a giallo gore. The killer, who disembowels the victims through their vaginas after she has paid to watch them all have various kinds of sex. Or skulked in the corners, voyeuristically shadow draped, with only the ominous giallo eyes revealed! The killer’s identity is never in question, really, and there are some rather laughable sex scenes – like the diddling with the gold chain – but then some other rather implied hardcore moves. The religious icon as murder weapon is not credible, considering the damage it was supposed to have inflicted.
This is some particularly horrible dialogue as the two sisters quibble over a dead father and absent mother, made all the more absurd by the nudity of D’Amario as they are arguing. Magnolfi plays the proto-goth with all the bed sheet grabbing angst of a spoiled loony. The scene in the stone side chapel where she caresses the carved Christ before fainting dead away must be seen to be believed. It is beyond campy. And do not get me started on the silver shimmer of a nightclub act, the dubbing of which made it look like a sketch from SCTV. Love it.
Still, the great locations, a drug narc subplot, and a lot nude females kinda make this clunker a watchable dud. Not to mention the fact that Stefania D’Amario, the titular Ursula, goes on to star in Fulci’s ZOMBI! As Barbara Magnolfi, with her dangerous puppy dog eyes, makes a fated appearance in Argento’s SUSPERIA.
René Cardona Jr.’s TINTOREARA is an awe-inspiring mess of terribleness. Billed as a horror film / JAWS rip-off, it accomplishes only knuckle-dragging problematic machismo among a nonsense backdrop of the permissive party culture of the late 70s.
MANDY is a rare Nicolas Cage movie, meaning that Cage has few lines and scant opportunity to chew the scenery. Cage exudes a cosmic overacting.
But immediately after we are treated to a pimp slapping scene and then a scene of police brutality (Mattau slapping Kathy Lee Crosby for posing for nude pictures, I guess), the movie spirals into nonsense. A cold case is linked to the current case, a boring realtor is boringly trailed, and we no longer get the ensemble cast that populated the first half of the movie.
What The Hell Did I Just Watch? 