Horror

Frankenstein’s Hungry Dead (2013)

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Trafficking in tastelessness, encompassing a comedic streak and in no danger of awards chatter, the indie-horror effort Frankenstein’s Hungry Dead is directed and co-written by Pretty Dead Things’ prolific Richard Griffin. His jacking-around movie works better than its clumsy title suggests. The plot is no great shakes, either, as some stuck-up high school students face a life-changing choice: two hours of detention or a trip to a wax museum? (Spoiler: They pick the latter.)

The site in question is where the eyepatch-sporting Charles Frank — aka Dr. Frankenstein (Griffin regular Michael Thurber, The Sins of Dracula) — crafts his wax creations using body parts acquired from unwitting bodies, like those belonging to the unwitting teens. They’re easy to catch when they’re participating in such shenanigans as having sex in a coffin and when they’re just plain dumb: “Hey, you’re that boring museum tour guide! Well, fuck you, boring museum tour guide!” (And so it is with “fuck”: all in the delivery.)

Hungry Dead’s advantage? Spirit. I’ve always been a sucker for movies set in wax museums, and if Griffin isn’t, he’s sure done a good job of designing the ruse. This pic both parodies and praises such old-school scares, not to mention your above-average episode of the original-recipe Scooby-Doo. Griffin works so often and so quickly that viewers never know whether the result will be worth a watch (The Disco Exorcist) or not (Murder University); Frankenstein’s Hungry Dead steps into the plus column. —Rod Lott

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Read the original review in Exploitation Retrospect: The Journal of Junk Culture & Fringe Media #53

Comedy

Camp Massacre (2014)

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Now that the costly process of shooting on film — not to mention developing it — is a thing of the past, technology allows anyone to make movies. But just because you can doesn’t automatically mean you should, and some of today’s DIY efforts not-so-secretly make me wish operating a DV camera required a license. Nowhere does the amateur-hour approach ring louder than in the realm of the slasher movie.

What is it about the venerable but nonvenerated horror subgenre that inspires so many would-be Wes Cravens to cry “Action”? (And why do their screenplays drop a “fuck” — or its endless variants thereof — on seemingly every page?) In hopes of finding the next Make-Out with Violence or Puppet Monster Massacre, I’ve sat through many microbudgeted horrors, none more horrible — and that’s really saying something — than Camp Massacre, originally titled as Fat Chance.

Once it gets past the prologue of former porn star Bree Olson (The Human Centipede III) getting stabbed — with a knife, pervert — in the shower for no discernible reason other than killing two birds (nudity, name value) with one stone, the film by 2013’s The Hospital co-directors Jim O’Rear and Daniel Emery Taylor (who also serves as screenwriter) gets down to business. Unfortunately, that business is fat-shaming in the name of alleged comedy, as 10 rather large men — ranging from merely obese to morbidly so — compete in a 30-day boot camp for the fictitious reality show By the Pound, with a $1 million booty at stake. As the show goes on, the competition becomes tougher — and yet easier, because of the serial killer offing the contestants.

O’Rear and Taylor consistently go for the gross-out, so hardcore fans of Troma pick-ups might find it funny. I can appreciate a good fart joke and other scatological set pieces when they’re well-executed, but the bottom line with Camp Massacre is that it’s an ugly mess — visually, conceptually, metaphorically — and too witless to offend. Ironically, the film could have mitigated its awfulness simply by slimming down. In an utterly baffling creative decision, Camp Massacre runs a bloated, Cimino-esque 129 minutes long! One By the Pounder pledges, “We’ll fix it in post.” They didn’t. —Rod Lott

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Read the original review in Exploitation Retrospect: The Journal of Junk Culture & Fringe Media #53

Reading Material

Reading Material: Short Ends 3/19/17

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Getting a nightly fix of The Twilight Zone in a syndicated run one summer in the 1980s, I was taught a couple of things: Rod Serling was a frickin’ genius, and not all black-and-white TV is boring. According to TV critic Mark Dawidziak, many more lessons await imparting, which he has detailed in Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Twilight Zone: A Fifth-Dimension Guide to Life, a “heartfelt tribute … wrapped in a self-help book.” Here, Dawidziak has taken 50 common-sense life lessons — such as “Never cry wolf” and “If something looks too good to be true, it probably is” — and discusses them in relation to key TZ episodes (even the one with Talking Tina). While the book is not an episode guide, each chapter could stand alone as a fine essay on one aspect of the game-changing series. Fully illustrated with stills from the shows in question and including “Guest Lessons” from the likes of Leonard Maltin and Mel Brooks, Dawidziak’s syllabus is infinitely more relatable than the likes of Zig Ziglar, but you’d better already be a hardcore TZ fan to gain any value.

By the power of Zeus, Italian Sword and Sandal Films, 1908-1990 is not the definitive book I wanted it to be, mostly because so little of it required actual writing on the part of co-authors Roy Kinnard and Tony Crnkovich. Published by McFarland & Company, the trade paperback does cover what its title promises, with films of the peplum genre arranged alphabetically from Adventurer of Tortuga to Zorro the Rebel, but said coverage is largely rendered irrelevant by the existence of the IMDb, because we get a full list of the cast and crew. Comments from Kinnard and Crnkovich, unfortunately, are limited to a sentence or two, except in the rare case of a game-changer like 1958’s Hercules. Otherwise, their contribution to each entry is scant; for example, for Charge of the Black Lancers, they write in total, “It’s the Poles vs. the Tartars in this action drama, co-produced by Italy’s Royal Film, France’s France-Cinéma Productions, and Yugoslavia’s C.F.S. Košutnjak.” Gripping, no? Although illustrations are bountiful, Italian Sword and Sandal Films is more of a list than a book. I suppose if the apocalypse wipes out the internet, it may serve more purpose.

I want to get lost in Rat Pack Confidential author Shawn Levy’s latest book. Not in the sense of perusing its pages, which I’ve already done, but actually retreating to the world it depicts. Pending the creation of the time machine, I was born too late. The next best thing is the book, Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome, and while not exclusively about movies and the men and women who made them (hence the Pucci, as in kaleidoscopic fashion maven Emilio), the cinema arguably did more than high fashion to make the Italian capital a cultural touchstone around the postwar globe; Anita Ekberg’s fountain-cavorting sure saw to that. Part history, part travelogue, all intoxicating, Levy’s multinarrative work vividly recalls a jet-set splendor that, while never can be replicated, at least can be revisited through the film classics that have visually bottled that feeling forever. Or we could always throw an orgy. —Rod Lott

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Sex

Up Your Ladder (1979)

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Sketchy in all definitions of the word, Up Your Ladder plays like a filmed adaptation of a dirty joke book, but with all the finesse and professionalism of middle schoolers who got hold of Dad’s camcorder while he was out of town. Its floss-thin excuse of a framework for its phalanx of gags is a talking apartment building — no, really! With 138 units, the Villa Elaine has many stories to tell, and the movie’s host is Elaine herself, personified in transparent overlay miniature by Cindy Morgan (in her feature debut, one year before her breakout role as Caddyshack seductress Lacey Underall), whose suspenders-centered outfit greatly diminishes her considerable sex appeal.

Elaine introduces viewers to various tenants past and present (as well as people elsewhere, meaning Up Your Ladder is not even competent enough to stick to its own stupid concept). Then we see their naughty, below-the-Borscht Belt bits play out — many times for no more than one minute, since it doesn’t take that long to reach a punch line. As good an example as any: Inside apartment 319, a bachelor (Rick Dillon, Female Chauvinists) is about to get busy with a hot-to-trot date (Tallie Cochrane, The Centerfold Girls) until she expresses fear she’s been exposed to either VD or TB, but cannot remember which. So naturally, the horny guy places an urgent call to his doctor (Thomas Newman, The Munsters’ Revenge), who advises, “Tell her to run around the room a few times. If she coughs, fuck her.” Hang up, lights out, slide whistle.

I know, I know: Groan. And that’s just the first sketch!

If you choose to subject yourself to Up Yours (its alternate title), grit your molars and steel yourself for a prudish woman (Joe Dante regular Belinda Balaski, Amazon Women on the Moon) harangued by obscene phone calls; for a bedridden old man (Michael Pataki, The Bat People) who, thinking himself a vampire, bites butts; for a busty manicurist (Ilsa herself, Dyanne Thorne) applying for a barbershop job; for a nude tap dancer (Odette Wyler, aka The Boob Tube’s Becky Sharpe) who, uh, tap dances nude; for a chesty medical patient afraid to undress (Jill Jacobson, Nurse Sherri); for a compulsive masturbator (didn’t catch his name — does it matter?); and for a very hungry husband (Chuck McCann, Hamburger: The Motion Picture) whose wife forgot to buy groceries, so he eats a can of dog food out of desperation.

Wondering where the sex might be in that last setup? It’s in McCann’s character fatally attempting to lick his own testicles — blessedly offscreen, and for that, we are thankful. Too bad that doesn’t extend to the rest of this atrocity, so unfunny it’s an enemy of comedy. —Ed Donovan

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Comedy

The Ambushers (1967)

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Matt Helm adventure No. 3, The Ambushers, finds the ever-sassy, always-sauced spy (Rat Pack crooner Dean Martin) ordered by Intelligence Counter Espionage (ICE) to retrieve the federal government’s super-secret, experimental flying saucer, which has been hijacked. One José Ortega (Albert Salmi, Caddyshack), a millionaire beer magnate, and his precious, all-powerful, matter-moving laser beam are to blame. Luckily for the film, Ortega and the U.S. UFO are located in Acapulco, so what’s a secret agent to do? An assignment’s an assignment, and Matt unconvincingly goes undercover as a fashion photographer.

Accompanying Matt are his alcohol-soaked bloodstream and fellow ICE agent Sheila Sommers. As played by Janice Rule (The Swimmer), Sheila is homelier than the Helm series’ average above-average female foil; compared to forbearing curve-bearers Stella Stevens in The Silencers or Ann-Margret in Murderers’ Row, the stick-like Rule looks like a PTA mom — okay, so a PTA mom who hasn’t given up on joie de vivre, but still, Rule’s casting as eye candy is eyebrow-raising curious. The Ambushers is, after all, a movie whose opening credits serve as a proto-MTV video for Hugo Montenegro’s catchy, teeny-bopper tune about how hot and sexy those hot and sexy girls are in their hot and sexy bikinis. Plus, every woman wants to bed Matt, and he, every woman.

The Ambushers’ cavalier attitude toward coupling makes a subplot of Sheila’s extra-icky and bothersome: When Ortega zapped the saucer out of the sky and onto his turf, Sheila was its pilot … and he raped her into a shadow of her former self. Still shell-shocked from the trauma, she harbors personal reasons to end Ortega’s reign.

Folks, The Ambushers is a comedy. At no point does director Henry Levin (The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm) allow anything to alter the sunshine-and-lollipops mood of the picture (and, by extension, the four-pic series as a whole). But brush all those thoughts aside so we get back to the brass tacks of our businessman/rapist: He has plans to auction the spacecraft to the highest bidder, currently “an Oriental gentleman whose name I cannot pronounce.” Oh, boy. Given those Breakfast at Tiffany’s times, I’m half-surprised Levin and screenwriter Herbert Baker (The Girl Can’t Help It) didn’t Go There and name the $100 million bidder Commander Chow Mein or something.

Sexism, racism, other -isms: all par for the course (coarse?) of that era of pop culture. Through the eyes and ears of today, these elements smart … and yet do not completely ruin the fun, of which the movie offers plenty, right down to a roller-coaster of a climactic chase. The Ambushers is a flick of literal bullet bras, killer maracas, melting belt buckles, insta-tents, giant beer bottles, beer-barrel bowling, magic bartending, deadly fezzes, funny cigarettes (not the kind laced with THC, mind you), sultry Senta Berger (The Quiller Memorandum) and constant jokes at the expense of women having bumps and folds that men do not — hee-haw! —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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