All posts by Louis Fowler

Kitchen Sink

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

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WTFOn an alternate timeline in an alternate America, a civil war with questionable sides rages on as everyday people try to survive by ignoring it. As the despot president begins to face his last few hours of life, the ubiquitous television network decides to hold a rather sketchy benefit concert for either the victims of the war or the promoter’s sizable debts, whichever comes first.

To play the show, they spring from prison the troubled troubadour of this timeline, Jack Fate. As he surveys the broken country with a wide array of name-brand actors, dropping abstract mantras and humanistic tantras, things continue to fall apart as Fate and his band perform some death-defying tunes in preparation for the last night of America as they seem to know it.

This remarkably prescient travelogue was conceived by (and starring) Bob Dylan, by the way.

One of the most woefully ignored films of the past 20 years, Masked and Anonymous is the dystopic present presented as a bitter song of broken hearts, hard-edged and mean-spirited in a way that refuses to give answers or, even worse, reasons for anything that it presents on screen and in theory.

And while that is usually something that might irritate most people, here, through Dylan and director Larry Charles’ acidic pen, it all seems like it was just two decades too early. With the threat of wars, pestilence, famine and death riding just over our own horizon, we don’t need to know the hows and whys anymore; we just gotta turn on the TV and figure out a way to survive it.

Dylan as Fate is, ironically, the movie’s Everyman; when he says, “I stopped trying to figure things out long ago,” it’s the only way to make sense of the shit that rolls down from on high, both in the film and in our own damnable lives, guaranteed no tomorrows. —Louis Fowler

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Comedy

Terror Firmer (1999)

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Circa 2000, Troma’s Terror Firmer was one of a handful of discs I purchased when I picked up my first DVD player and man, what a high point that was. I must had watched the film a hundred times that summer and, even worse, tried to show it to every single person who dared set foot in my then-hovel.

As impressionable as I was back then, true to form, I firmly believed Terror Firmer to be more than just another Troma flick; I believed it to be director Lloyd Kaufman’s testament to his life in independent cinema, straight from the fart heart.

Twenty years later, while much of the offensive humor is now, admittedly, “of the time,” the spirit of the film and what it stands for is still more important than ever, an idealized and wholly personal take on the now long-dead sentiment of art for art’s sake, something this generation has forgotten in the search for easy cash and easier fame.

On the set of blind director Larry Benjamin’s (a meta-Kaufman) latest Toxic Avenger flick, the cast and crew of the film are graphically murdered by a long cool woman (?) in a black dress, seemingly with an ax to grind (literally) against independent film. But even that’s a minor quibble when compared to the constant trouble that goes on behind the scenes.

Besides the ample nudity that is more questionable than erotic, there are plenty of gross-out gags and gag-out grossness, such as busty actor Joe Fleishaker chewing on his own guts as he’s mutilated by an escalator; caged monster Ron Jeremy singing “Amazing Grace” as his appendages are hacked off; and, most famously, Yaniv Sharon as a P.A. with a tiny pecker who goes on an all-nude tour of NYC before having his head crushed by a piece of Troma’s best stock footage.

And while all of that still works in goo-covered spades, the oft-repeated rallying cry of “Let’s make some art!” is the message of this medium; if you have a vision, you’ll do anything to get it up on the screen, even if it means capturing random acts of tractor-truck maiming, dill-pickle coitus or transsexual immolation. It’s something that Troma’s been doing it for well over 40 years, dollar signs be damned. —Louis Fowler

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Sex

Cries of Pleasure (1983)

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Filmed in a year when Spanish cult director Jess Franco made 12 (!) films, Cries of Pleasure tends to get lost in the pubic bushes, until now never released outside of his native country and, honestly, with good reason.

While Franco does have his strong points — usually in his far more outré sexual outings — when you’re making a dozen low-budget features, most of them can’t be winners. Pleasure floats somewhere in the crusty bottom; even though it’s another dip into de Sade’s bloody pool, it’s not strange enough to be all that interesting.

That being said, if you’re looking for plenty of simulated sex, included exaggerated acts of oral and very exaggerated squeals of arousal, this might elicit your own cries of pleasure as Franco favorite Lina Romay (Night of Open Sex) goes on a clitoral rampage with sensually mustachioed dynamo Robert Foster and his bevy of whip-smart beauties in a gorgeous villa overlooking someplace in Europe.

With loads of extended tongue-kissing and recoiled morality, there’s also a mentally handicapped Spanish guitar player who muses over what he sees as cinematic bookends; it’s easy, because as this unshaven team of deviants goes at it, he’s usually forced to sit there and strum his instrument — and I do mean his guitar, sadly.

For Franco completists and chronic masturbators — and those of you who tend to combine the two — Cries of Pleasure is a pleasurable outing that doesn’t really say anything, but shows a whole lot and, when it comes to most of Franco’s considerable output, I guess that’ll do, pig-boy. —Louis Fowler

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Horror

Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (1961)

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The surprisingly Italian flick Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory — originally titled Lycanthropus — is nowhere near as exploitative as the American moniker sounds, but still has some solid scares and solid stares, mostly thanks to ingenue Barbara Lass as Priscilla.

As a handsome new science teacher arrives at a girls’ reform school somewhere in the hills of what I’m guessing is Italy, students are being slaughtered by the apparent wolves that roam the area after dark. As we soon learn, however, it’s a slightly hirsute werewolf that knows a sprightly form of proto-parkour, leaping tree-trunks in the wilderness.

But when Priscilla’s equally comely pal is murdered, she decides to get to the bottom of this mystery with the new teacher; the school’s caretaker, with his gimp arm, is nearly beaten up by drunken townspeople in a tavern for their troubles. Red herrings abound!

Typing all that out, it ultimately saddens me that this entire madcap premise wasn’t the basis for a novelty hit by a Bobby “Boris” Pickett rip-off — possibly Italian as well — that bubbled under the Hot 100 in the early ’60s. I think it would have gone something like this …

Priscilla was walking back to the dorm after class,
When she heard a howl that made her heart beat fast,
She investigated with the new science teacher,
And wondered aloud “Who is this groovy creature?”

It was a werewolf … ah-hooooo!
It was a werewolf … where can he be?
It was a werewolf … ah-hoooo!
It was a werewolf … in a girls’ dormitory!

Every few weeks when the moon would turn,
Pitchforks will rise and torches would burn,
The townsfolk would circle the old reformatory,
Just to capture the werewolf in the girls’ dormitory!

It was a werewolf … ah-hooooo!
It was a werewolf … where can he be?
It was a werewolf … ah-hoooo!
It was a werewolf … in a girls’ dormitory!

Could it be the caretaker who is nobody’s fool? (Wha-wah-oooh!)
Could it be the girl causing trouble in school? (Wha-wah-oooh!)
Could it be the old woman hiding in the woods? (Wha-wah-oooh!)
Or maybe the teacher, giving Priscilla the goods! (Whha-wha-ah-hoooo!)

It was a werewolf … ah-hooooo!
It was a werewolf … where can he be?
It was a werewolf … ah-hoooo!
It was a werewolf … in a girls’ dormitory!

Or maybe not. —Louis Fowler

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Horror

The House That Jack Built (2018)

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I had a short-lived friendship with a person who once, while drunk and on a bridge-burning rampage, told me they were a disciple of Lars von Trier and believed in his supposed theories of “absolute depravity.”

I hauled ass out of that person’s life not too soon after.

I feel like I made more than the right choice to vacate after viewing the film The House That Jack Built and, even more so, after the fact that von Trier cast Hollywood meathead Matt Dillon as an unrepentant serial killer. True to form, it’s a 152-minute movie with the doltish Dillon trying his best to act menacing, a seemingly impossible feat that I can’t tell if von Trier is genuinely exploiting or caustically insulting.

Told in six chapters labeled “incidents,” the killer career of Jack is followed, in a typically detached way that will cause the smarter people in the audience to smirk in unison, as women are brutally murdered, including a mother who watches him slaughter her two small children, and a verbally abused girlfriend who get her breasts sliced off and made into a purse in purely pornographic detail.

The film only becomes slightly interesting in the epilogue where Jack finds himself in the afterlife with the poet Virgil (Bruno Ganz), traveling through an eerily low-budget version of the circles of hell, leading to the only truly satisfying moment of the movie: his well-deserved casting off into the unholy flames.

The main problem with The House is that by now, the boundaries that von Trier has supposedly pushed over the past few decades have become more rote and routine than anything else; this serial killer sex fantasy has been done by better directors with a far more meaningful takes on the subject matter rather than the angry middle-schooler scribbling that, per von Trier’s own words, “life is evil and soulless.”

I hate to say it, but, like I outgrew my former friend’s notable antics, I think I might have outgrown von Trier’s insignificant shock value as well. Is that maturity? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.