All posts by Louis Fowler

Sex

Shining Sex (1977)

Leave a comment

Within the first few minutes of Shining Sex, we find Jess Franco’s muse Lina Romay (Revenge in the House of Usher) plumping up her breasts and vagina to a tune that sounds like Procol Harum’s Matthew Fisher jamming on the Hammond. As her bare pubis humps the heck out of some shag carpeting, an emotionless couple admires her with dead eyes, inviting her over for the night.

Once there, Lina and the couple spend long periods of time mostly tongue kissing and rubbing nipples, all shown in extremely long and lugubrious detail. As she shakily orgasms after being penetrated by a small porcelain hand, Franco himself shows up miles away as a handicapped scientist babbling on about “hearing things.”

Between travelogues of Spanish castles and other beautiful scenes of the European countryside, after getting mystical lotion rubbed on her nude body, Lina is apparently possessed by some sort of “superior force” from another dimension which, of course, leads to even more loose and languid sex, the only true excitement coming from a constantly moaning Franco.

It’s a somewhat intriguing screenplay that probably could have been fleshed out — no pun intended — a bit more, but then I remembered this was Franco and we’re lucky we got this much of a story. Essentially a vehicle to show off Lina’s constantly spread genitalia, it’s films like this that make it hard — so to speak — to truly dislike a filmmaker like Franco. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Western

True History of the Kelly Gang (2019)

Leave a comment

If America had a wild west, then Australia had a fuckin’ wild west, mate, one that seems to continue in the barren outback to this very day. And like our own outlaws such as Billy the Kid or Jesse James, they have their own bloody versions as well, most notably the legendary Ned Kelly.

Having seen various on-screen incarnations of Kelly by both Mick Jagger and Yahoo Serious over the years, I’m gonna say both were heavily fabricated, while director Justin Kurzel’s apocalyptic interpretation in True History of the Kelly Gang seems closer to the real story, Oedipal subtexts and all.

In the film, Ned’s parents were a drunk and a prostitute — always a perfect recipe for a Down Under ne’er-do-well, if you ask me. His father’s inability to find the family food leads Ned to slaughter a random cow for beef, but Dad is taken away to the notorious Aussie prisons and ultimately killed there for his crime.

In need of money, Ned’s mom sells him to rotund Russell Crowe (Unhinged) — almost resembling Denver Pyle here — who promises to turn him into an outlaw and, true to form, lands him in jail within a few minutes. Growing up in the hud, Ned (George MacKay, 1917) becomes a two-fisted rabble-rouser prone to psychotic delusions of grandeur, all of which he writes in his diary, apparently the basis for this film.

Clad in women’s frocks and calling themselves the “Sons of Sieve,” this gang of proto-punks takes on the damned English one bullet at a time, leading to a final showdown with the colonial bastards where Ned dons his famous “iron man” suit, fighting the oppressors like a true hero of the people.

Gritty and grimy, dirty and dank, this anarchist retelling of the Kelly story is a steel-toed kick to a koala’s groin, giving the man’s mythology the revolutionary style it probably needed. It’s an Aussie tale of revolt and rebellion that even the Americans — on film and in real life — couldn’t compete with, and thank God for that. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Aenigma (1987)

Leave a comment

If there’s one thing I love about the grotty films of Lucio Fulci, it’s no matter how terrible a flick of his might be, there are always one or two vomit-worthy scenes that tend to hellishly elevate the thing above most other horror movies. In Aenigma, there’s plenty to choose from, but I’m going to go with a schoolgirl waking up covered in slimy snails.

I know here, in digital print, it doesn’t sound like much, but visually, it’s truly a waking nightmare of slithering special effects.

One of Fulci’s later films, he dutifully takes the worst elements of movies like Patrick, Carrie and Phenomena to make a film that, while not better, is definitely a lot more fun than any of those. Over the strains of a terrible attempt at a pop song, a young girl has a date with the hot gym teacher. Before anybody questions the morals, it turns out to be a bloody joke and she ends up in a coma.

Around that same time, horny new girl Eva (Lara Naszinski) show up at a Boston school for girls and she might be possessed by the bullied student who likes to manifest herself over a famed poster of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. From a head decapitated by a window to a Renaissance statue coming to life and choking a girl, the grotesque deaths keep piling up and how.

But, now that I think about it, even more disturbing than the traumatic snail death is the constant rotation of prepubescent strange the older men hanging around campus seem to be getting all up in — most notably, the gym teacher and the hospital doctor who, when at the school, wears a sweater that reads “University.”

The illicit intercourse, along with the splatter-filled set pieces Fulci (Demonia) was best known for, the only thing that truly remains an enigma to me is how to pronounce the fleetingly pretentious title. Eh-nigma? Augh-nigma? Augh-eh-nigma? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Split Second (1992)

Leave a comment

Of all the sci-fi flicks to rip-off, filled with a lone alien, multiple guttings, large explosions and little to no story, one of the best is Predator. But, thinking outside that pine box, Split Second decided to go a different route and do Predator 2. Well, okay.

Sometime in the near future — and now far past! — Great Britain of 2008, prescient global warming has turned the isles into one big, dirty swimming pool. Puffy Rutger Hauer is burnt-out cop Harley Stone, a foreign-exchange officer who lives on chocolates, coffee and the long-lasting regret of his partner dying at the hands of a 10-foot-tall beast with a taste for human hearts. But can you blame him?

Armed with psychic powers left unexplored, he’s partnered with pencil-pushing nerd Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan). This mismatched duo slogs through a soggy England with generous hand cannons and shotguns, trying to protect the vapid Kim Cattrall from what turns out to be a rat-loving, tide-drenched version of Satan, here an ineffectual representation of absolute evil, but a great clone of a Xenomorph.

Also, at one point, Stone refers to a dog as a “dickhead” and then questions it as the witness to a murder in a nightclub that rock legend Ian Dury runs. Maybe that should have been the movie …

For years, I mistook this flick for the Dolph Lundgren favorite I Come in Peace (“You go in pieces …”), like a cinematic idiot. And while I was sure I would be disappointed by this, I happy to report that Split Second is unapologetic in its constant writhing in wet trash, an art form that only Tony Maylam, director of the equally trashy The Burning, could ever achieve. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Sex

Pervertissima (1972)

Leave a comment

As much as it sounds like a ribald musical notation, Pervertissima instead takes us into the world of sleazy French journalism as a comely young girl with a possible herpes sore on her upper lip and absolutely no reporting skills is sent into Gay Paree for a piece on “Love in Paris.”

Admitting she’s a virgin to the overt sexaholics on the paper’s staff, she is sent to brothels, dance clubs and an avant garde sex ritual, none of which has anything to do with love, but I guess I see the point. What I don’t see the point of is how she ends up in the clinic of a mad scientist who dreams of ruling the world like a god — his words — through ineffectual mating experiments.

And as jarring as the switch from a low-rent skin flick to a no-scares horror movie is, even that is nothing compared to the horrendous sexual harassment the females of the film go through, from the boss randomly kissing secretaries quite passionately to a rapist reporter who, in the middle of a meeting, tries to get off on our lead actress. Maybe Mad Men was right?

Regardless, this bizarre mélange of fragrant trash is best credited to director Jean-Louis van Belle, known for equally de-rousing flicks like Forbidden Paris, The Lady Kills and Made in Sex, all of which sounds like great names for terrible New Romantic bands. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.