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Updated 4-13 |
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Meatloaf: Searching for Paradise
The film is a documentary of Meat’s 2007 tour. We went to the Boston gig, and it was pretty fuckin’ spectacular. How it got that way was though much wringing of hands and a good amount of hilariously bad press in Canada. Meat started the tour in the great white north, and critics found his nightly grope-fest with 28 year old singer Aspen Miller during the Paradise at the Dashboard Light bit sorta creepy. Well, he is 60 years old at this point. And she looks about 15. How does Meatloaf turn this disastrous tour around? With a wig. Woops. Shoulda said ‘spoiler alert’. Anyway, that’s just the minor drama. Most of the running time is devoted to how fuckin’ nuts Meatloaf is. Whether he’s wolfing down a drugstore’s worth of pills and potions before every gig or rolling on the floor and sucking from an oxygen tube afterwards, the dude is never content to act like a normal human. It’s awesome. There’s plenty of splendidly loud and quite epic live clips along the way as well. Great stuff. PS: There were probably 12 people at the sole theatrical screening here in town. Most were 40-something couples, and one 30-something couple (us). And then, quite curiously, two chattery teenage girls burst in. One was wearing a skin-tight “I Love Meatloaf” half-shirt. The other one looked like she might have been kidnapped. The loud one said “I want Meatloaf in my mouth!” before the movie rolled. That’s pretty clever innuendo for a kid, but still, 16 year olds with Meat-lust? Even at 60 years old, that fat man has still got it.
-Sleaze Meat meets Aspen. Sexy or weird? Your call.
Monkey Warfare
Sometimes black but never bleak, Monkey Warfare is an understated tale of a bizarre love triangle that plays out in Slacker-y vignettes that never really end, they just sorta trail off, like a muddy old grunge tune. The climax, while not all that surprising, does offer a decent jolt, but the film’s strength is in the queasy, uncomfortable, and often hilarious interplay between this very odd couple and their new teenage friend. Monkey Warfare is low-budget and fittingly threadbare, but well-worth the effort it’ll take to find it. If nothing else, it’ll make you feel much better about your own life. Unless you’re a garbage picker by trade, as well. Then you’ll probably just nod in agreement a lot. -Sleaze
Monkey Warfare trailer. Contains no monkeys.
The Ruins
If you’ve seen the trailer, you know the whole plot. Bunch of dumb kids on vacation in Mexico get chased by weird locals to the top of a Mayan temple, and then the leaves and vines in the temple try to kill them. And since there is nothing remotely frightening about plants, they try and liven up the proceedings with some gooey self-mutilation, which seems to be a requirement of all R-rated teen horror films since Cabin Fever. It was no fun to watch then, and guess what? Still no fun.
The only high-point of this entire tedious affair is the lead blonde, Laura Ramsey. She has very large breasts, and she bares them in the first ten minutes. Also, she is, in fact, in her underwear for the last hour of the movie, but at that point she’s covered in open sores, which sorta ruins it. Maybe that’s why this movie is called The Ruins, because it ruins any fun you could possibly have watching it. If so, good call. -Sleaze
The Ruins red-band trailer. Extra gross. |
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Inside
(2007)
– Paul Gaita
Inside's seriously creepy trailer.
Streets Of Fire
(1984)
But "SOF" does have all the things a fourteen year old boy coming of age in the Reagan era would want in a movie. At least THIS fourteen year old boy: laconic hero, doll-y female lead, ludicrous action sequences, a bombastic soundtrack and dialogue that consisted of naughty words and snappy one liners. Not to mention a bona fide top ten hit--I had not quite forsaken my Casey Kasem listening ways in 1984--in the form of Dan Hartman's "I Can Dream About You". Typically, I saw the movie in 2008 rather than when it came out, which is when I should have seen it. Also typically, I rented the film to blow irony-dipped spit balls at it only to find that in fact it totally transported me back to another era entirely in a way that made me feel downright wistful.
Lane, Pare. 80's style. On a rational level, "Streets" is completely ridiculous. This self-styled "Rock and Roll Fable" is long on atmosphere and short on pretty much everything else. Hack Michael ("Tom Cody") Pare plods along as a soldier of fortune hired to steal back his former sweetie Diane Lane--as caterwauling Bonnie Tyler style rocker "Ellen Aim"--from a vicious motorcycle gang of what Sleaze would call "Evil Fonzies". (It's that strange early 1980's fixation on the 1950's, meaning that you have both drum machines and pompadours in this film). When Pare isn't brooding or shooting things with his trusty Winchester, Pare spends his time trading wooden quips with his sidekick Amy Madigan ("McCoy") as well as bullying Rick Moranis ("Billy Fish", Aim's manager, in an ill-advised dramatic role). "Streets" really isn't a fable. It's not even very fucking rock and roll, given the fact that most of the music is OTT Jim Steinman written Wagnerdirge. (The Ry Cooder incidental stuff is good but it never is given center stage). The only true rock and roll cred this flick gets is an extended cameo by Fear's Lee Ving and a night club appearance of The Blasters. It's painfully clear Lane is merely lip synching during her performances. The actual voice belongs to Face to Face vocalist Laurie Sargent. (That's FTF the Boston new wave band, not the Cali-punk group of the same name). And while I love the Dan Hartman hit, it's far more a blue eyed soul swipe than a rocker.
Diane Lane pretends to sing!
As 1980's eye-candy though, this movie comes highly recommended. You simply can't lose when a young Diane Lane is the female lead. (And her appearance in certain scenes seem to eerily pre-cog Mandy Moore and no, I am not just saying that). Another solid hook "Streets" has is jaw dropping performance by another relative unknown of the time, Willen Dafoe. ("Raven Shaddock", natch). Dafoe seems to be channeling a truly demented hybrid of "Low" era David Bowie, Eddie Munster, every rockabilly loser you've ever met and a very gay fireman. He's impossible to take seriously as a villain but it's equally impossible to take your eyes off him.
Dafoe: the villian, obviously. Really, the same could be said for this movie as a whole. In the same way that Hill's "The Warriors" was more about the way we'd like to think street gangs are rather than their ugly reality, "Streets" is more about an idea of rock and roll fable than the genuine article. If all this sounds a little too post-modern, just keep in mind that more recent films like "The Crow" and "Sin City" and at least a half dozen others I can't think of at this moment owe a huge stylistic debt to "Streets", however cornball and trivial it seems now. I could dole out a few more pages worth of philosophical meandering about the movie but why bother? Go and rent it for yourself and come up with your own conclusions. It probably won't mean much to anyone who wasn't a teenager in '84, but for those of you who were, it's pure shlock enjoyment. In my book, anyway. - Sascha
Streets of Fire, the painfully 'theatrical' trailer. |
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Doomsday
The logic holes in Doomsday are large and confounding, but toss coherence and a stiff first act aside, and you’ve got a solid hour of flesh-rending, car-crashing, head-chopping action. Mitra is amazing as the un-killable heroine, the bad guys are all berserk punk rockers, the soundtrack is loud and throbby, and the climactic car chase – cut almost directly from Road Warrior – is enthralling. I can’ t imagine that any fans of old-school sleaze and exploitation would walk away from this one disappointed. This is Neil Marshall’s valentine to loud, messy, dumb-but-awesome 80’s video trash, and he nailed it perfectly. Watch this as a double feature with 1990: The Bronx Warriors, and your mind will glaze over for good. -Sleaze
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BUFF
round-up:
Wizard vaguely resembles the HG Lewis original. There’s Montag and Grand Guignol horror-shows, certainly. But where Lewis told a very simple story, Kasten weaves a needlessly confusing tale involving puffer-fish poison, S&M, and zine editing. It’s filled with hipster douchebags and Suicide Girls, and Crispin, as the titular Wizard, seems as confused as the rest of us. And why is he wearing a giant codpiece? Its just a fuckin’ mess, really, with no laughs, no shocks, no fun. A wasted opportunity that apparently ate up eight years of Kasten’s life. Sigh. Significantly, they gave away DVDs of the original Wizard of Gore after the screening. Too bad they didn’t give them out beforehand, we could’ve all gone home and watched the real thing. Sigh.
Second night, who knows what happened. I wasn’t there. We stayed home and watched Cotton Comes to Harlem. Redd Foxx is awesome. The day was dedicated mostly to shorts programs anyway. This festival was lousy with shorts. Saturday’s events opened with a rare screening of Onward to Calgary, directed by Sleazegrinder podcast co-host Jim Ether. Onward was prefaced by a short film called I Dream in Stereo, which was introduced by a sheepish Kevin Monahan, BUFF’s director of programming. Apparently he didn’t want to include the short, because it’s awful, but the rest of his staff thought it was funny-awful, so they demanded its inclusion. I dunno who made it. It looks like a public access production. It’s got a fifty-ish guy singing a song. He does stop-motion animation of his headphones rotating around his head. The young cretins in the audience howled with laughter. Fake laughter, mostly. You know the kind.
And that was it. I mean, they showed a bunch of other movies as well, but I was not there to see them. I’m guessing some were awesome, some were awful, and some were just OK. That’s the way these things usually go. -Sleaze |
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The Loreley’s Grasp
(1974) “We have to forbid him to expose himself in front of the girls.”
You shouldn’t come expecting any visually impressive moments from The Loreley’s Grasp like those slo-motion midnight rides in the Blind Dead pictures – this is a meat-and-potatoes monster movie with a body count to rack up and a sizable cast of comely Spanish actresses to undress (Line handles the lion’s share of that agreement, but Tortosa’s no slouch either, and the schoolgirls take baths and get ready for bed like champs). And the violence is suitably gross – a number of rubbery, gooey hearts are fondled by the Loreley in her lizard gear, and there’s a nasty bit involving a scientist’s face and a beaker full of acid – so unless you’re a complete and utter drip, the action in Loreley’s Grasp should be more than satisfying for your creature feature cravings. BCI’s DVD offers the first complete and uncut version of The Loreley’s Grasp on these shores (it played in theaters here in a truncated form under the title When the Screaming Stops), and comes with optional Spanish-language and English-dubbed audio tracks. A Spanish theatrical trailer (“To live, she needed to kill!”) is also included, as are the original Spanish credits (nothing really special there), a gallery of stills, and thorough liner notes by Spanish horror expert Mirek Lipenski. Muy bueno. – Paul Gaita
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We
Like to Drink, We Like to Play Rock N’ Roll
Aural Amphetamine:
Metallica and the Dawn of Thrash
Dark Chamber
Vintage Erotica anno
1960
Goregasm
Die and
Let Live
Kettle Cadaver
Operation: Pussycat
- round-up by Sleaze ______________________________________________________ |
Right. The Meatloaf
movie played for one showing, in one theater, before debuting on some
satellite TV station the following week. As marketing ploys go, that seems
pretty weird. But Meatloaf – the man and his music – is BIG, brother, and
deserves the big screen treatment. So we went. 
Dan (McKellar) and
Linda (Wright) are two aging ex-revolutionaries turned shabby
garbage-pickers who spend their below-the-radar days selling crap on Ebay,
stealing bikes, wandering listlessly around funky 
If you raked up some
leaves in your backyard and hid one of your friends underneath, and then
made a movie about the leaves coming to life and chasing people, you’d
probably look at the resultant footage and think, “Well, that was a dumb
fucking idea.” Then you’d erase it and shoot homemade porn instead. Right?
Well, Carter Smith took the idea and tossed several million dollars at it.
And now it’s too late to erase. 
Chances are if I had
seen this the year it came out I would have loved it to death. "Streets Of
Fire" lacks most of the things I look for in a movie these days, such as a
plot (believable or otherwise), actual characters (not cardboard cutout
stand-ins) and interesting, intelligent dialogue (rather than a collection
of snappy one liners and naughty words).
Boston
So anyway, Onward to 
Afterwards, we walked
down the street to another venue and saw Spine Tingler, a documentary
about 60’s horror auteur William Castle by the prolific Jeff Schwartz. A
very loving ode to the man that brought us classic b-movie gimmicks like Emergo, Percepto, and, as John Waters called it, “Give Us Your Money-o”,
it’s a thorough and charming portrait of one of cinema’s last great
hucksters. There’s interviews with Waters, John Landis, Joe Dante and
Forrest J Ackerkman, among others, as well as clips from the Tingler,
Homicidal, Straight Jacket, Rosemary’s Baby,
Bug, and even the rarely seen
and ultra-creepy Shanks, Castle’s 1974 film about a corpse brought back to
life as a meat-puppet, starring mime-king Marcel Marceau! There was a
lively Q&A with the director after the film, wherein he mentioned that
William Castle was a daily pot smoker, which explains a lot. 
At midnight, I caught a
screening of the jaw-dropping Il Bosco Fuori, a 2006 Italian splatter
film. Coming on like a lunatic-asylum mish mash of Last House on the Left,
I Spit on Your Grave, Creepers, and Boarding House, Fuori (advertised as
Last House in the Woods by the festival, but titled Outside in the Woods
on-screen), is just full-on gonzo, a rip-ride of monster kids, mutants,
cannibalism, rape, torture, mutilation, gut-spilling, pus, chainsaws, and
revenge. It has a couple moments of pure bile-inducing horror, but it’s
all so over the top that it mostly plays like heavy-handed satire. One
thing’s for sure, it’s unforgettable. I don’t think there’s any plans for
a US release on DVD or anywhere, but it’s readily available on several
dodgy websites, so if you get the opportunity to see it, by all means do
so. It’ll fry your brain but good. 
Otis
closed the
festival on Sunday night. A very funny and eye-popping black comedy about
a dim-witted, 40 year old man-mountain of a serial killer (Bostin
Christopher), who abducts a series of ripe teenage girls and stages
mock-proms in his basement torture chamber. I know, that doesn’t sound
funny at all, but it is, especially when he snatches bright-eyed Ashley
Johnson, which triggers a bloody, half-baked revenge rampage by her
family. Starring the ever-awesome Illeana Douglas as the blood-lusting
pop-eyed mama bear and Daniel Stern as the mealy-mouthed dad, Otis is a
pitch-perfect horror comedy that satirizes the torture-porn genre with
remarkable subtlety but plenty of blood and guts. Director Tony Krantz
(co-creator of 24, and director of Sublme) held a lively post-screening
Q&A, where he mentioned that Otis is a metaphor for the Iraq war. He had
an involved explanation for it, too. Sounded like bullshit to me, but
whatever his intentions, the film works fine on it’s surface level, and if
you dig gruesome black comedies – think Parents, Serial Mom,
Murder Party
– than you’ll love Otis. It’s set to hit DVD shelves this summer. In the
meantime, check out the trailer 
Agreeable slice of
Euro-monster action from Spain’s Amando de Ossorio (the Blind Dead movies)
about a sexy water spirit, the Loreley (Line), who turns into a scaly
creature and eats people’s hearts in order to maintain her immortality.
Chief on her menu are the students at a local girl’s school (which appears
to focus its curriculum on pool frolicking and Swim Wear 101), who
disregard repeated notices by stick-in-the-mud headmistress Silvia Tortosa
to lock their doors, and are butchered for their sexy stupidity. A local
hunter (Tony Kendall, looking very bored) is called in to patrol the
school grounds, but his virile presence seems only to rile up anyone in a
skirt – including the Loreley, who catches a glimpse of 
BJ Lisko reviewed this
amazing doc elsewhere on the site, but I just saw it and wanted to mention
it again. It’s the story of the Unband, three drunkards from upstate
Massachusetts who formed a ramshackle party band in college and just never
had the good sense to quit. The Unband took ten years to get nowhere, and
this film shows you exactly how that happened, with all the attendant
Spinal Tap-ish moments along the way, including their very own Yoko, who
does, in fact, finally break up the band. Rock n’ roll really is a loser’s
game, and this entertaining slice-of-life proves it. Highly recommended. 
Sleepaway Camp’s
chick-with-dick Felissa Rose continues her slow and steady climb back to
the middle of the scream queen heap with this cheapjack Hitchcock homage
about a camera-clotted apartment building and the killer within. Tightly
plotted, twisty, and full of taut performances, director Dave Campfield
does an admirable job of dressing his tiny-budgeted DV film up so that it
looks like a slick, Hollywood thriller. 
No-budget zom-coms are
pretty common these days. This is yet another one. The story involves a
couple of teenage slackers, Benny (Josh Lively) and Smalls (Zane Crosby),
who throw a party that’s crashed by radioactive zombies. And that’s pretty
much all you need to know. While there’s plenty of gut-spilling and face-chomping on deck, at it’s heart, Die and Let Live is a buddy comedy, and
comes off like a zero-budgeted cross between Shaun of the Dead
and Superbad. Sort of. Fitfully entertaining. 
A fast n’ furious
Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! homage featuring three semi-hot Japanese
chicks in skin-tight thrift store outfits? Sign me up! Although it’s only
45 minutes long, this no-budget redux of that mid 60’s classic
delightfully bonkers and needlessly violent, with a high body count and
some hilariously out-of-it performances. The story is an almost
note-for-note interpretation of Meyer’s original that got a little jumbled
in the translation. Sure, there’s a mean old man with a tongue-tied giant
for a son, three go-go dancers on a kill-for-thrills rampage, and a mousy
innocent girl caught in the middle. But the outfits are straight from a
mid 70’s disco dumpster and the dialogue makes very little sense. But, you
know, who cares? It’s still a rollicking murder-party with a fruggable
beat. Awesome.