Category: Blog

A couple of years back, I started doing the “HoopTober Challenge” created by user Cinemonster over on Letterboxd because I love horror (obviously), making film lists, and being challenged to watch new stuff. During that time, there was one film that popped up on numerous lists in the category of “Films From Another Country”: 1973’s Belladonna Of Sadness. Given the fact that I’m also doing the “Horror x52 Challenge” and the “Birth Year Challenge”, both created by user kynky, waiting until now to watch it helped me kill two birds with one screening.

Belladonna Of Sadness (aka Kanashimi no Belladonna; La Sorciere, Tragedy of Belladonna, or Belladonna) is an animated Japanese production written by Yoshiyuki Fukuda and
Eiichi Yamamoto, and directed by Yamamoto, based on Satanism and Witchcraft by Jules Michelet. It tells the tale of young Jeanne and Jean, lovers preparing to wed in medieval France. Seeking the approval of the local Baron on their wedding night, the Baron instead demands a tax from Jean that he knows cannot be paid. Going beyond claiming “prima nocta”, the Baroness encourages her husband to share Jeanne with the entire court.

Follow this, Jeanne vows her revenge, and in doing so sows the seeds to allow the devil in. Jeanne rises within stature and wealth within the village only to be struck down by the envious villagers and the wicked Baroness. When she has hit rock bottom after being cast out of the village, the devil manifests in his full power and seals the pact with Jeanne that brings her into her full powers as well.

For the rest of the story, I encourage you to go watch this for yourselves, Fright Fans. This film is visually stunning and quite beautiful at times with the primary use of water colors for the animation. Most of the animation is actually camera pans across still paintings, but you let that go as the story draws you in as you cheer for Jeanne to gain her vengeance. The score by Masahiko Satoh is dead-on jazzy 70’s but not to the point of being obnoxious and fits perfectly.

The obscurity of this film is one of the reasons I picked it for this post, but there are some definite WTF?!? moments within it as well, dear readers. The animation depicting Jeanne’s rape is visually shocking in the way that it combines symbolism with the literalness of this violent assault. There is also nudity and fairly graphic sex many times throughout the film, including the devil looking (and acting) very phallic whenever he appears, growing larger with each appearance. And at about the 19 minute mark, I think I witnessed the birth of tentacle hentai when Jeanne’s torn dress kind comes to life.

But the capper for the sex scenes? Well the orgiastic magical rites that Jeanne enacts with the villagers, of course. I’ve been mulling over how to best describe these scenes for the last day or so, and here’s the best I can come up with: Picture Yellow Submarine and The Electric Company (yes, the 70’s kids show with Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno) dropped acid with shrooms and formed the largest gang-bang daisy chain you’ve ever seen. … You want to go watch it now, don’tcha? Wait! I left out the bit that looked like someone giving a shocker to a greyhound. Don’t worry. You can’t miss it.

The witchcraft, possession, murder, and devils make this an amazing Asian art-house entry into the sub-genre of animated horror, and I highly recommend watching this wherever you can. It’s currently up on Shudder and has been played on Turner Classic Movies “Underground” block on Saturday nights in the past. Let me know what you think when you do. It does cast quite the spell on a viewer.

Pop quiz: What do you get when you borrow from Lucio Fulci, Ridley Scott, and Cronenberg and use Columbian drug money to help finance it? That’s right, Fright Fans! You get this sci-fi horror production, Alien Contamination (aka Contamination).

Following his success of the 1978 “space opera”Starcrash, Luigi Cozzi wanted to stay in the realm of sci-fi for his next film. After seeing Ridley Scott’s legendary classic, Alien, Cozzi decided he wanted to make pretty much his own version but on a fraction of the budget. Keeping the eggs, the acid, and an alien creature, but keeping the setting to just Earth, Cozzi was underway. Shot in just 8 weeks with locations in Rome, New York City, Florida, and Columbia (we’ll get back to that one), Cozzi had his film.

Now granted, also because of the budget, the big alien creature wasn’t stop motion and was animatronic instead, the creature wasn’t what Cozzi wanted. As the viewer, you only get to see random quick, poorly lit shots of the entire creature. But by that point you don’t really care.

This is where the Cronenberg influence comes in. The acid from the eggs? Well, it’s actually spores released by the eggs when they are in a hot and moist environment. When the spores explode from the eggs, anyone that is splattered by the eggs also explodes!!! In a few of the shots, you get the impression that Cozzi spent a good chunk of the budget on the sternal and gut explosions that happen several times throughout the film. Some are slightly laughable but others are fairly impressive. The graphic nature and slow motion filming of the bodily explosions actually earned Alien Contamination a spot on the “Video Nasties” list for excessive blood and gore.

Crap. I just realized I hadn’t even mentioned an important thing: the plot! A derelict cargo ship coming into the harbor in New York City doesn’t answer any hails. Upon searching the boat, the harbor patrol, a scientist, and a cop find a few dead bodies and a curious collection of pulsating eggs, that look like footballs made from alligator hide, in the boiler room by some steam pipes. Now remember what I said makes the eggs go boom? Yep. Welcome to the game, Victim #1!!!

Bring in more scientists and more government agencies, and we learn the eggs came from space (dun-dun-DAH!) when two astronauts (one played by Ian McCulloch of Zombi fame) returned to Earth. Someone has been hiding and producing more eggs on a Columbian coffee plantation for their own nefarious plots (or are they??) for world domination!

Okay. All the Columbian stuff? Yes, this film was partially financed with Columbian drug money. Hell, a couple of the gunmen that greet the cop and the scientist at the plantation probably weren’t even actors and provided their own guns! Cozzi did say that the drug smugglers where pleased when the film turned a profit on their investment, though.

In the end . . . oh yeah. The ending. This hits the Fulci influence home for me. With the derelict ship floating into the harbor and an ending shot showing NYC again and a potential threat within it, I thought I was watching Zombi again. Seriously, fright fans, this is not a great movie by any means, but it was fun to watch it for what it is. Watch it with friends, have a few laughs, and be surprised by the bodies going *BOOM*.

Trailer for “Contamination”

Nunsploitation –

A subgenre of exploitation films which centers on aberrant secularized behavior of religious women and had its peak in Europe in the 1970’s. (Cobbled from Wikipedia.)

This was my first adventure into the dark little corner of this particular subgenre. I think before this the closest I came to seeing a nunsploitation film was 1971’s The Devils. That infamous film had at least ten times the budget of this plus the star power of Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave. Killer Nun has the fading star power of Anita Ekberg (La Dolce Vita, War And Peace) as the lead, Sister Gertrude, and the less than 5 minutes of screen time of Alida Valli (Suspiria) as her Mother Superior.

There are 3 main reasons why I chose to watch this one:

1. It’s available on Shudder.
2. It’s a Section Two “Video Nasty”.
3. I needed to watch a “video nasty” as part of the “Horror x52 Challenge” that I’m participating in on Letterboxd.

Let’s perform our penance and talk about the film for a bit. Set in modern times, which happens to set it apart from the medieval time period used in most nunsploitation tales, Sister Gertrude isn’t the most stable of people after having a brain tumor removed recently and developing a morphine addiction during her recovery. The Sister with a growing smack habit breaks bad and goes to the city to score when her stash dries up at the care home (don’t know what else to call the institution she helps run with its odd mix of residents/patients).

Prior to this outing, we get to see one of her “psychotic” moments of anxiety and distress while assisting the doctor. If you deem to watch this or already have, can you please tell me what instrument they are using for her psychotic break scenes? Seriously. I’m torn between it either being a theremin or a singing saw. Whichever it is, it made me chuckle a bit at the choice of it for those musical stings.

Anyway, back to the outing. Sister Gertrude decides to get some with a rando from the bar, and this leads to one of the more ridiculous simulated sex scenes I’ve ever seen for any Italian horror film out of the 70’s. Given the height difference and doing it standing up against a wall, either the dude was trying to jab it through her navel or his penis can contort like an elephant’s trunk. … Okay, yeah. I nitpick things like this. Sue me.

For the first 40 minutes, not a hell of a lot happens. But then the Killer Nun dons some pink Playtex dishwashing gloves (which made my mind think giallo), and the body count and intrigue both begin to build. Intrigue, you say? Why, yes I do! It’s around this time that the vast majority of the viewers can see a twist coming, but even then it comes off well.

Another “close but not quite” moment I liked was a scene when Sister Gertrude has everyone in their rooms praying for one of the deceased while she kneels in the hallway. As the camera slowly and steadily pulls back down the hallway away from her, she’s kept in the center. This scene would have been a greater moment for the film through the cinematography if it had been a dolly shot instead of handheld. I say this because you can see the minor tilting of the plane/frame as the camera man is backing up, and the centering of the frame shifts just a bit during the pull back as he dodges a couple of chairs that are off to one side of the hall. If they couldn’t do the dolly, they could have at least removed the obstacle of the chairs!

For the aspects that most likely earned it the “video nasty” tagging, there is the drug use, the sex, the violence, some torture (a deliciously done murder using injection needles), but oddly there isn’t really any anti-religion sentiment or social commentary to it. From what I’ve been reading, this also sets it apart from most other nunsploitation films.

In the end, I can recommend checking this one out. Not a great film, but not a bad one either. Give it a view if you have Shudder, or check it out elsewhere. You just might make a habit out of nunsploitation films!

Until next time, Fright Fans, keep it weird and keep watching!

“We all have our personal horror stories to tell.

May yours never be as devastating as Miss Helen Black’s.”

Well, as long as I don’t live a repressed life and pick up a random Rick James puppet from a thrift store, I think I’ll be good!

Seriously though, this is another one of those films you hear about on “so bad it’s good” lists or by word of mouth from friends that like oddball, low-budget films. And I can definitely declare that Chester N. Turner’s Black Devil Doll From Hell falls into both categories for me.

Released in 1984 after being filmed over several years on a budget of about $10,000, this felt like a labor of love to me on some levels. In comparison to stuff like Birdemic that is just so bad it’s truly bad, you get the impression that the folks behind this were actually trying to give it their best effort with what they had available. Turner even took a correspondence course on film making before starting this production. Originally intended to be part of an anthology film (Tales From The Quadead Zone, Turner’s only other film), the script ended up being too big to be just a short. So why not whip out the camcorder and the Casio keyboard (what better way to write and perform your own score and soundtrack) and make a feature-length film out of it?

Our story is that of Miss Helen Black, a devout and pure woman saving herself for marriage. One day she enters an antique shop and notices a ventriloquist dummy sporting impressive cornrow braids (which actually were inspired by Rick James). The shopkeeper warns her that the dummy’s original owner was “an East Indian” and that the doll grants the owner’s “most heartfelt desire”. She also tells Helen that she has sold the doll 4 times already, but each time the doll somehow finds its way back to the shop.

After purchasing the doll and getting home with it, Helen takes a shower with the doll sitting on the toilet. That’s when the puppet wakes and uses its apparently telekinetic powers to slowly slide open the shower curtain and get a gander at a wet, soapy, and suddenly aroused Helen!

Confused by these feelings, Helen decides to sleep on it, only to have some rather dark erotic dreams featuring the puppet. After a bit of “How’d you get over there?!?” with the puppet moving around on its own, it jumps her after another shower (just like in the dream!) and knocks her out cold. Waking up later, confused and tied to the bed, Helen is raped by the puppet. The effect this assault has on her is to awaken her repressed sexual desires to the point of her begging to be fucked by the puppet. (Funny outtake: The puppet’s head popped off during the filming of the sex scenes. Talk about getting a little head!)

The next day, the puppet is nowhere to be found. Cue a montage of Helen cleaning her house for the next several minutes. Sure, she can clean her house, but she can never clean this stain upon her soul. In wanton desperation to satisfy her new-found lust, she invites in a street hustler she had ignored and rebuked the day before. But even his mighty and sweaty hip action cannot satisfy her. This bit made me think Turner was probably influenced some by the classic adult film The Devil In Miss Jones, where a repressed virgin is introduced to sex and depravity after death and is eventually condemned to a Hell where she cannot get any sexual gratification, no matter how much she pleads or begs. Following the disappointing sex and Helen telling him, “Just finish up, and get the hell out”, we are given the most terrifying moment of the movie: A full-frame close-up of the street hustler giving us his “O” face. **shudder**

As with any possessed doll movie, you know things ain’t gonna end well for Helen. Granted the real life happy ending for Shirley L. Jones, who played Helen, is that she ended up marrying the director after the production was completed.

The cut I watched was just over 90 minutes on Shudder. There is a VHS cut out there that was butchered down to 70 minutes by Hollywood Home Video without Turner’s input after they had picked it up for distribution. Granted, I can see where many things could be trimmed here and there throughout, but it’s still kinda shitty to cut a person’s film without them. There remains the look and feel of having just popped in a much-loved videotape, complete with tracking distortions and warbles throughout. Given the content of the movie, by the end I felt like someone had meant to give me their home movie but accidentally gave me one of their home-made soft core fetish porn tapes instead!

Until next time, Fright Fans, keep it weird and keep watching!

(Be warned, dear readers. Ahead there be plenty of spoilers.)

The short and sweet premise for this slice of aged cheddar written and directed by Mohammed “Mardi” Rustam out of the glorious 1980’s is a group of aliens are kidnapping teens and co-eds between the ages of 16 and 24 to harvest their platelets to use in a scheme for maintaining their immortality. So I guess Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce wasn’t the only “space vampire” movie to come out in ’85, eh?

Admittedly, the poster for this one caught my attention while perusing the listings on Amazon Prime in preparation for our latest Streaming Screams episode. The one shared above is actually toned down when compared to the others that have her nipples standing out like thimbles. Then I read the cast list, and it sounded like the casting director was playing one of the weirdest games of Mad Libs ever. Check this list out:

• John Carridine (aged film legend of many a horror and sci-fi film)
• Julie Newmar (Cat Woman herself!)
• Tina Louise (Ginger from Gilligan’s Island)
• Neville Brand (Sadly, his last film role. I always loved him in Tora!Tora!Tora!. He was also in Mohammed “Mardi” Rustam’s Eaten Alive! in 1976.)
• Aldo Ray (A talented character actor I remember best as Sgt. Muldoon in John Wayne’s The Green Berets.)
• Tony O’Dell (One of the Cobra Kai members in The Karate Kid)

But even after this incredibly odd list, one name truly caught my attention: Amber Lynn.

You see, Miss Lynn is an adult film star who played a prominent role in my adolescent development. To put it another way: She was the star of one of the first porn films I ever saw. And Evils Of The Night was made during the prime of her very active career. Along with Miss Lynn, there are a few other adult film actors and actresses who appear. Trust me: Watch the movie, and you can spot them. Or just cheat and use IMDb. The rest of the cast is a bunch of actors who only did one or two things, if any, after this. But back to discussing the film . . .

Within the first 10 minutes, you know exactly what you will be getting with this one. You have a space ship landing and two couples making out in the woods somewhere, oblivious to anything but gettin’ it on and smoking the devil’s weed. The more amorous of the two couples (who also happen be played by two of the aforementioned adult film stars) quickly strip down and get down. While the guy is standing with his back to a tree and has his girl bent over and facing the other way, a rope is wrapped around his neck. It’s kind like auto-erotic asphyxiation, but there is no auto or erotic to it.

At first you may believe that both couples have been killed off, but wait! They have only been incapacitated by Kurt (Brand) and Fred (Ray), the guys from the local gas station that have been recruited by the aliens to kidnap specimens for them.

Cut to Dr. Kozmar (Carridine), Dr. Zarma (Newmar), and Cora (Louise), the alien scientists, standing around one of the young bodies being drained of platelets as Dr. Kozmar gives a wonderful bit of brief exposition that felt like it was lifted straight from a classic sci-fi film of the 50’s. Nearly reminded me of some of the bits from Plan 9 From Outer Space but done better.

Billy (O’Dell) makes for an escape but gets blasted by one of the high-heeled guards using a ray-gun ring. One the same guards that we just saw groping at each other for no discernible reason in the hall after taking one of the gurneys from Kurt and Fred. The outfits on the guards really are impressive.

Without further ado, we jump to the next day and a beach party full of co-eds, various levels of clothing, and generic 80’s synth pop/rock music. The hair, the make-up, the music, the clothes, all of it cements what decade this film is in. Another product of that era that somehow slipped my mind is a term I haven’t used in years: Preppies. Every guy in this falls firmly into that little category.

As the night falls, some think of camping out while most of them head off for making out. The song made for the following scene felt like a total rip-off of any popular duet love song of the era, but the use of it felt even stranger as they cut back and forth between Ron and Nancy, the engaged and tender couple, and Eddie and Joyce (Lynn), rutting like dogs in heat in an abandoned house. Seriously about the dog part. Eddie gives Joyce one of the most gratuitous tongue baths you’ll ever see.

Some of them are kidnapped by good old Kurt and Fred, and this leads to one of the more laughable moments for me. After Ron wakes up half-dressed in the back of Kurt and Fred’s truck, he stands up, looks at them coming at him, and calmly asks “Hey. What’s going on?” right before they try to grab him and he finally gets a clue to run!

During that same night, the remaining trio of Heather, Connie, and Brian, are all kidnapped in one way or another as well. Connie did try to escape during her abduction. An escape attempt that included some of the most polite terrorized door knocking I’ve ever seen. Sadly for her she was knocking on Cora’s door.

Nancy works on her own escape from the hospital the aliens are using as a base, and the trio are tied up in the basement of Kurt and Fred’s gas station. As Heather gets free of her bonds, Kurt comes down with plans to molest Connie before handing them over to the aliens. During her struggle to get out of the basement, Heather and Kurt end up doing a tag team reenactment of Driller Killer with Heather on the losing end. Connie then manages to get free and clocks Kurt with a wrench. You know, the wrench you see her grab when she sits on the floor and then has to reach behind and pick up again even though she hadn’t dropped it?

Connie gets up stairs and takes out Kurt with a car from the lift, crushing him, but Fred returns and beats her and ties her up for killing his best friend. Nancy arrives just in time to save Connie from a coup de grace by blasting an air hose in Fred’s right ear. A blast so strong that blood sprays out his left ear. …. Yeah.

Anywho, while Fred runs after an escaping Heather for several more minutes, the aliens decide to cut their losses and leave, and Brian finally gets his shit together and gets out his bonds and the basement. As Brian battles with Fred to save himself and Nancy, the departing alien ship blasts Fred with a laser to tie up a loose end. Credits.

I noticed I was getting a bit long-winded in my review here, so I did leave out some of the other gem moments in this. If you are a fan of cheesy, drive-in films, this one should be right up your alley. It felt like it was a beta version of something you’d find on Cinemax now, and I would love to see this done in a kind of “MST3K After Dark” style. That really needs to be a thing.

Until next time, Fright Fans, keep it weird and keep watching!

[A quick preface of concept before the real post begins.

I feel that I’m known by my friends, family, and our listeners to be the guy that will watch all sorts of obscure, foreign, and/or indie films. With that in mind, I’m launching a regular series for our web page here where I’ll chat about something I’ve recently watched for the first time that fits the bill. All films discussed in the series will be things off the beaten path for most folks but may be familiar fare for others. Either way, enjoy the ride. Feedback is always welcome, too.

… Let’s begin.]

You know how you scroll through the catalog on a streaming service (Shudder in this case) and add a bunch of stuff to your queue just because it sounds interesting? But then you never get around to watching some of those selections until said streaming service says the movies will be dropping from the site soon? C’mon, we all suffer from this malady. Right?

Anyway, such a notice prompted to finally settle in and watch The Duplass Brothers’ Baghead. Released in 2008, the film made its world premiere at The Sundance Film Festival. The story centers around four friends who want to make their own independent film to make the jump to stardom from their current status of playing extras.

The film opens with Matt (Ross Partridge), Chad (Steve Zissis), Catherine (Elise Muller), and Michelle (Greta Gerwig) sitting through a screening of a rather pretentious art house/indie short film created by a friend of Matt’s, Jett Garner (playing himself). Inspired by Jett’s work or spurred on by jealousy, the quartet retreat to a remote Californian cabin to hammer out a script of their own that they can star in.

The brainstorming session devolves into something similar to any group project I saw in college (complete with note cards!), and ideas are supported or shat upon, depending on who brought it forward and who is trying to sleep with who. I guess I should say at this time that Matt and Catherine have an on-again-off-again history, and Chad has a crush on Michelle. Michelle likes Chad, too . . .  but like a brother. After much alcohol and little progress, the group heads to bed.

Manipulations continue when everyone gets up in the morning, and Matt presents the brilliant idea to do a horror film featuring a killer who wears a paper bag on his head. Simple yet effective. But as the day leads into night, a new mystery arises after someone wearing a bag on their head scares Michelle in her room. Finger pointing ensues, and concerns grow that they may not be alone in the woods after all.

After watching this, I can see some of the foundations being laid for the future films of Mark and Jay Duplass, namely Creep and Creep 2. Besides the cabin used in this reminding me a lot of the one in Creep 2, the documentary/found footage style shown here becomes further refined in those films. Even though Baghead isn’t a documentary or found footage movie, the handheld shooting and incredibly intimate camera work makes it feel almost like a documentary. Add to this the natural, improvised feel of most of the dialogue and interactions and the dark humor, and you definitely have the template The Duplass Brothers evolved the Creep films from.

While I did clue into where the ending was heading (keeping things mostly spoiler-free in these reviews), it still worked for me. I must add, though, that one of the funniest moments in the movie for me involved one of the most epic wanking interruptions ever. Seriously, I almost did a spit-take across my laptop screen!

An added bonus of this film is the “Hey! Isn’t That ______??” component you can get with many indie films. Besides Ross Partridge (Matt), who is now known to most folks as Will Byers’s deadbeat dickhead of a dad, Lenny, on Stranger Things, we also are treated to Greta Gerwig, before Francis Ha. …. Excuse me. I should have said Golden Globe and  Oscar nominee (screenplay and directing) for 2017’s Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig.

All in all, I recommend giving Baghead a viewing if you are a fan of the Creep movies. Or even if you’re not a fan of them. Whatever your bag is, man.

Until next time, Fright Fans, keep it weird and keep watching!