NIGHT OF THE LIVING TREKKIES

I shared this on Facebook, and then realized – hey, why not on Lavender Lair? It’s just a trailer for a book, but I’ve seen short films that weren’t half as entertaining. I have no interest in reading the book, but I’ve watched this thing about five times now. It’s a scream.

FROM A SUB SHOP IN ZOMEBIELAND

(From the hilarious webiste Engrish, http://store.engrish.com/subwei.html)

TWO FROM TOBE HOOPER: MORTUARY & EATEN ALIVE

Mortuary

I got this 2005 Tobe Hooper flick in a 4-movies-for- $5 set at KMart. I haven't watched all of the films yet, but I bought the set because of this one, which I remember well. Denise Crosby (Pet Sematary) acquires a funeral home in a California small town soon after the death of her husband. She and her teenage son Jonathan (Dan Byrd) move into a house on the funeral home property.

Jonathan gets a job at the local diner, and makes some teenage friends -- and Goth bully enemies. His friends tell him the legend that a hideously deformed child from a family who once owned the mortuary -- who kept him locked up and abused him -- is still living there, haunting the place.

Of course this is true, and the first people who run afoul of him are the Goths, when they show up late one night to vandalize the cemetery. But there are bigger problems –including a weird fungus that looks like black veins and turns anyone living or dead that it touches into a homicidal zombie.

The cast is likable, the effects are good, the action fast-paced and involving. There's also a fair amount of humor that makes the movie more fun. My favorite scene is one where Mom makes several horrifically messy mistakes during her first autopsy while the kids are smoking pot upstairs, playing loud rock music, and the oblivious, stuttering local sherriff is pounding on the front door. The movie is enjoyable till the very end, when we're subjected to one of those "surprise" extra endings that makes no sense. It's still one of director Hooper's better efforts in recent years.




Eaten Alive

I watched this on IFC Grindhouse recently and went to bed with a headache. I saw it in the theater many moons ago, didn't remember it all that well, and was intrigued by the cast -- which included a very feeble-looking Carolyn Jones (TV’s original Morticia Addams) as a madam named "Hattie." It has a lot of good actors in it (also Mel Ferrer, Stuart Whitman, Marilyn Burns, William Finley -- a fave of mine -- and a very young Robert Englund as a horny redneck drug dealer). (Englund, BTW, was homely at that age, but his torso looks surprisingly hot in a wifebeater!)

Sadly, the actor with the most screen time was Neville Brand, playing a babbling demented-old-soldier hotel proprietor whose guests mostly ended up scythed to death and/or being fed to his pet crocodile. A lot of his dialog sounded improvised, and loud incoherent ranting gets old fast. William Finley inexplicably started barking like a dog at one point, and there was a little girl hiding under the house who kept squealing whenever she wasn't screaming. There was also extensive use of garish red lighting, which didn’t help.

I was horrified, but not in the way I hoped to be. I guess this movie was director Tobe Hooper's low point. I wanted to jump into the croc pond as a means of escape, but I stuck with it till the end. Ah, the things we do for love of the genre...

BTW, the most horrifying thing in the film was that Carolyn Jones's face appeared to have been utterly frozen by plastic surgery. She did a good job with the character's voice, but appeared incapable of any facial expressions at all.

After seeing this film, I'm posting about it as therapy. It's like trying to get a really nasty taste out of your mouth.

"Lassie" On Acid -- FIDO, A Suburban Zombie Movie

Director Andrew Currie's "Fido" (2006) can only be described as "A Boy And His Zombie" movie -- a "Lassie" episode on acid, only instead of a collie, we have a zombie. Billy Connolly brilliantly plays the title role without a word, mostly just using facial expressions and the occasional grunt to convey a great deal about his surprisingly sympathetic character.

The film is set in a fictitious world in which the zombie/human war that began in "Night Of The Living Dead" was won by the humans, and many zombies have been enslaved through the use of an electronic collar that turns off their hunger for human flesh. The time period has been shifted from the late sixties to the late fifties or very early sixties, a better era for playing out the film's ideas, and the look of the period is a big part of the running gag.

People live in towns safely fenced off from the "wild zones" where undomesticated zombies roam free; these areas are where you might end up if you can't afford a funeral (in which the head is buried in a separate casket). Unfortunately, the corporation that makes the collars, ZomCom, has used the situation to take over society, though most of the population is afraid to even talk about it.

Though there is violence and gore in "Fido," most of it is played for laughs, and you can't really call the film a "horror" movie. It's a black comedy/social satire that lampoons the conformity of suburban middle class life. "Fido" lives with a family that purchases him in order to fit in -- formerly the only family on the block without even one zombie. Timmy, the son (K'Sun Ray) and Helen, the wife (Carrie Anne Moss) bond with Fido, but complications arise when his collar malfunctions and they have to conceal the consequences. And yes, the name Timmy is a reference to "Lassie," and the scene in which the film openly refers to that is one of the funniest moments in "Fido."

I don't want to spoil the movie, so I won't say any more.

Plenty Lurid, Little Karloff in SNAKE PEOPLE

(Chickens need a stronger union on Korbai in The Snake People)

Director Juan Ibanez’s curious 90-minute Mexican flick The Snake People (1975), starred, among other folks, Boris Karloff and the dwarf Santanon. It had suggestive snake dances, zombies, lesbian makeout action, gangs of cannibal women rampaging in the streets, voodoo ceremonies, surreal Freudian dream sequences, and two scenes of necrophilia interruptus -- not to mention wild avante-garde music and hallucinatory camera angles. It sure wasn't boring. It kind of reminded me of the Brazilian Coffin Joe movies.

Karloff plays a plantation owner on a South Seas island called Korbai, which is governed by France. His niece Anabella (one-name actress Julissa), a Prohibitionist, comes to stay with him. She quickly falls for hedonist army officer Wilhelm (hairy chested Charles East), who works for Captain Pierre Labiche (Ralph Bertram), a pompous ass determined to repress native voodoo practices by identifying and capturing the local religion’s “ringleader,” Damballah. (Damballah is actually the name of a snake god in Voudun, but it seems like script writer Jack Hill doesn’t know that). Girls are being killed in order to be brought back as zombie sex slaves, but then they get crazed and run around the streets in mobs killing and eating luckless pedestrians (especially soldiers).

The film spends lot of time gawking at lurid ceremonies presided over by a half-naked priestess (exotic Yolanda Montes), who rubs big live snakes on her breasts and even sucks on their heads. Snaggle-toothed dwarf Santanon sacrifices chickens and laughs maniacally for no apparent reason.

The story makes little sense and the dubbing is awful, but the camera movement and music are involving, and the action is more than weird enough to hold one’s interest. It’s interesting that there are some substantially long sequences without dialogue, where the story is told purely visually. There’s a good bit of nudity and some gore (mild by today’s standards). Karloff, sadly, doesn’t have much screen time and is mostly in the film for his name and for the sake of one implausible plot twist. But I got caught up in it, and found some of its imagery haunting.

SHANKS: WILLIAM CASTLE'S LAST, AND ODDEST, FILM

(Marceau as Shanks in the renimation lab)


Director William Castle’s last film, “Shanks” (1974) is practically unknown today, and with good reason. For one thing, it stars Marcel Marceau (as the Oz character in TV’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer once solemnly said, “nobody deserves mime, Buffy.”) For another, it aims for a childlike mentality and calls itself “a Grim Fairy Tale” – and like a fairytale, it doesn’t concern itself with even trying to be plausible. It’s very odd, not at all like any other film this writer has ever seen, and it was probably a hard movie to promote.

Marceau plays two characters – a deaf mute puppeteer, Malcolm Shanks, and an aging eccentric scientist, Mr. Walker, who employs him as his assistant in secret experiments. Shanks enjoys entertaining the children in his small town, but is exploited by his shrewish sister and drunken brother-in-law (fellow mimes Tsilla Chelton and Philippe Clay), who spend all his money and bully him.

Walker’s experiments involve reanimating dead animals with electricity and then directing their movements with a small push-button remote control box. When he dies suddenly, Shanks reanimates him. Soon Shanks kills off the mean couple who are sponging off him and reanimates them too. Then he uses them as birthday party entertainment for Celia, a teenage girl on whom he seems to have a crush, sort of a Marcia Brady type (Cindy Eilbacher). She’s supposed to be a sweet innocent, but has no problem with laughing as the corpses stagger around to amuse her, sometimes making little faux pas like -- whoops! – cutting off their own fingers with a slice of cake.

This is all very amusing till a group of bikers show up and invade Walker’s mansion, dragging the corpse of a comrade killed in a crash. They tie up Shanks and terrorize Marcia – er, Celia. A zombies-vs.-bikers battle is inevitable, of course, followed by an ending that makes absolutely no sense.

Since the main character and reanimated dead don’t speak, long sequences have no dialogue. These are sometimes prefaced by title cards that strain to remind us of silent movies, as does the hokey, heavy-handed “old-fashioned” music that comments heavy- handedly on the action, especially when the film is trying to be funny. What works during the wordless sequences is that the mimes give the zombies grotesque movements, like dead bodies awkwardly jerked around by remote control would indeed have – pretty much the only believable element in the film. The scene where Shanks first reanimates Walker and makes him stand up, agonizingly wrenching himself from one impossible position to another with his limbs loudly crunching from rigor mortis, is amazing to watch.

Sadly, the absurd plot is just too dumb to accept, and the SPEAKING parts are mostly way hammy (mimes have to overdo it to get their message across without words, and it seems to bleed over into their acting). The lack of logic and believability would be okay in a movie for kids, but this is trying to be a violent horror flick – and if you can’t take it seriously, it’s not scary. And the ambiguous relationship between Shanks and Celia, frankly, isn’t cute and charming – it’s the creepiest thing in the film.

Castle himself, by the way, appears briefly as a grocer. He should have stuck to wiring theater seats and hanging skeletons from the ceiling, because his famous gimmick films all worked way better than this bizarre but unsatisfying swan song -- though if you’re a fan, it’s a must-see curiosity.