Horror

The Beast and the Magic Sword (1983)

Leave a comment

Despite a title that sounds like a primo Hawkwind cut from Warrior on the Edge of Time, this 1983 flick is actually a Spanish/Japanese co-production starring none other than Paul Naschy (aka Jacinto Molina) as ageless lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky, this time on the prowl in feudal Kyoto.

Cursed by a sorceress in his native Europe to always carry the chubby mark of a throat-biting werewolf, pudgy monster-man Daninsky travels to Japan at the behest of his local alchemist to find a cure from Kian (Shigeru Amachi), a wise man with a penchant for fighting monsters and solving mysteries.

Together, Daninsky and Kian take on assassins, ninjas, samurais and, of course, a satin shirt-clad wolfman. And while all that is entertaining enough, the set piece has to be the werewolf-vs.-tiger scenario that happens about midway through, an epic fight of bloodied fur that’s on par with the living dead vs. tiger shark from Lucio Fulci’s Zombie.

When he made The Beast and the Magic Sword, Molina was bankrupt and turned to Japanese producers for an influx of cash; they gave him the money and so much more, from the inspiration to bring the lycanthrope movie to Japan to the sheer guts of having said lycanthrope punch a tiger in his man-eating mouth.

Apparently filmed at Toshiro Mifune’s studios, this 10th and, for a while, final of the Daninsky films, it’s also one of the best in the series; while the story is a bit far-fetched, this Were Wolf and Cub tale of high action and even higher production values is an extremely entertaining melding of European trash and Asian class. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Exo Man (1977)

Leave a comment

Remember the first-act origin of Iron Man, where Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark builds a bulky metal outfit while being held prisoner in Afghanistan? Draw that section out to feature length, reduce the budget to equal a 12-year-old’s allowance and you have Exo Man, a superhero movie made the way they generally were in the 1970s: for prime-time network television.

As wealthy old white men are wont to do, Kermit Haas (José Ferrer, The Swarm) instructs his goons to rob a bank so he can’t be outbid in the upcoming auction of the Gutenberg Bible. At said bank is college professor and physicist Dr. Nicholas Conrad (David Ackroyd, The Dark Secret of Harvest Home), who jumps into action as a good Samaritan and catches a fleeing robber. Naturally, this puts Conrad on the radar of Haas’ right-hand man (The Incredible Hulk’s Jack Colvin in women’s sunglasses); in a subsequent skirmish, Conrad not only gets clobbered, but paralyzed below the waist.

Good thing the doc’s been experimenting on how to alter the structure of matter — or something like that. All that matters is he succeeds — depicted through the not-so-special effects of magnets under the table — which enables him to “walk” again. To justify the title, he constructs a protective suit that makes him look like an unholy blend of a Shop-Vac and Conky from Pee-wee’s Playhouse, then goes out at night to fight crime, one sloooooow and lumbering step at a time. His Kryptonite? Toppling over.

Like Iron Man, Exo Man gives us the claustrophobic, you-are-there shots of Conrad’s super-sweaty face within the unforgiving helmet. Whereas Tony Stark’s is top-o’-line and outfitted with a holographic dashboard, Conrad’s relies on switches and buttons, all marked using an old-school Dymo label maker (and one button misspelled as “MALFUNTION”). As an underdog of a telepic, Exo Man carries a similar ambling, DIY aesthetic and plays the material with utter sincerity. Shot as a pilot, it never went further than this and didn’t deserve to — unlike writer Martin Caidan and director Richard Irving’s previous team-up, The Six Million Dollar Man. —Rod Lott

Kitchen Sink

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Leave a comment

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

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Swallow (2019)

Leave a comment

Rosy-cheeked and hair bobbed, stay-at-home housewife Hunter Conrad (Haley Bennett, 2016’s The Magnificent Seven) has it all, from the rich and handsome husband to the picture-perfect home — everything a woman could want, it seems … except purpose.

She finds it shortly after her hubs (Austin Stowell, Colossal) gets promoted and she gets pregnant, but it’s neither of these things. It’s a sudden and inexplicable compulsion to swallow random objects — a marble, a pushpin, a AA battery and so on — and, after passing them, to retrieve them, clean them and display them on a tray like precious baubles, as a reminder of what little independence and agency she possesses. As her new secret hobby progresses, the objects grow more threatening in size and shape and potential harm.

Hunter could be the next-door neighbor to Julianne Moore’s Carol White, the equally disillusioned and oppressed spouse at the center of Todd Haynes’ Safe. Looking every bit like a sexier June Cleaver in living color, the timid Hunter dresses the 21st-century part she is asked to play: the upper-class wife, doting yet subservient. She is an appendage of her self-absorbed Crest Whitestrip of a husband, a trophy for his collection, a commodity to be used and consumed and re-used, ad infinitum. That alone is a disturbing predicament — one amplified once writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis introduces the element of body horror.

Graduating from shorts to his first feature, Mirabella-Davis builds Swallow as a slow-burn story, set in antiseptic suburbia yet grounded in reality. With no flashy camera moves, the film’s frames often resemble photo spreads from Architectural Digest, with his Good Housekeeping protagonist suffering on every page.

Bennett is in the unenviable position of carrying Swallow’s weight entirely on her shoulders; its success or failure depends on her. More than up to the challenge, she gives a beguiling master-class performance. Her breathiness and mannerisms initially reminded me of Michelle Williams, which is not to say Bennett’s tremendous work here is any kind of imitation. All else being equal, if Williams were the star, Swallow would shortlist her for a fifth Oscar nomination; Bennett deserves that same consideration. Her film may not be for every palate — and it’s not — but for those whose tastes are amenable to a little arthouse horror in your psycho thrillers, it hits the spot. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Terror Firmer (1999)

Leave a comment

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

Get it at Amazon.

Random Genre & Cult Movie Reviews