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Reviews
Police Academy 3: Back in Training (1986)
"The mind is mightier than the bosom."
Okay, so these films were never the most respected of the 1980s, but they at least started off with a nicely foul-mouthed, sexist-pig approach. This, the third film in the series, marks the point at which the sequels began their rapid descent into insipid kid's fare; references to the original simply come across as lazy re-hashes (which, let's face it, they are), and the new characters lack any real bite. As with 'Police Academy's 2 and 4, G.W. Bailey's absence is painfully apparent.
An excrutiating karaoke singalong (complete with Tackleberry on sax and Jones grooving away on bass) rubs salt into the already-chafing wounds. And there was still a long way to go before 'Mission to Moscow.'
Nosferatu a Venezia (1988)
Naff, wannabe-arty Euro shocker
Warning the other characters (and, presumably, the audience) that the seance in which they are about to take part could "provoke reactions of quite terrifying proportions," Christopher Plummer proves himself a less-than-reliable guide through this hideous mess. With pompous, over-cooked music blaring out of every scene, regardless of what is actually taking part on screen, and the kind of existential angst that would make a 14 year old goth blush, 'Vampire In Venice' lurches from one flaccid cliche to another. Gypsies dancing around a fire on the beach at night? Check! Street carnival with masks and silly frocks aplenty? Check! Vampires musing on the pain of spending eternity alone? Please, no more.
The 'horror' scenes appear to parody the entire genre. The film's running time - the video case claimed it was just over 90 minutes, an outright lie - stretches out into the black wastes of infinity, making the experience of watching it akin to sitting through one of Warhol's experiments in cinematic endurance. Klaus Kinski, so watchable in almost anything else, never seems sure whether he's the devil incarnate, or an aging rocker out of retirement for one last comeback gig. Even Donald Pleasance drifts by, unable to make a dent in the vast wall of boring, self-satisfied predictability. The horror of eternity was surely never supposed to be THIS bad.
King of Sex (1986)
Tatoos and piercings and sleaze, oh my
Nick Zedd has a rough sexual playtime with two young women in the film's first half; in the second, whilst dressed in drag, he attempts to fellate a too-drunk Rick Strange. All the while, Killdozer's 'King Of Sex' grinds away on the soundtrack.
Although the film's short length and use of rock music over dialogue inevitably lends 'King Of Sex' the air of an overly explicit music video, there do remain numerous undercurrents and aesthetic pre-occupations which occur throughout Kern's work. The film's structure, for instance, pre-empts his better-known 'The Evil Cameraman' in its first half documenting ritualistic S/M abuse, only for the second half to focus on the humiliation / emancipation of the earlier protagonist. As with all Kern shorts, this is kinky, greasy-looking stuff: tattooed New York punks making tattooed punk sleaze. Good music, too.
Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002)
Cortez the Killer
Whilst the sheer psychedelic lunacy of the first is toned down (although Alan Cumming does return in a brief cameo), the second outing for the Cortez kids is still gloriously imaginative filmmaking shot through with a break-neck pace. How many other kids' movies out there are knowing reworkings of 'The Island Of Dr Moreau' (check out the character of, ahem, 'Romero'), featuring Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin, Steve Buscemi, and Mike Judge in the cast?
Inspired madness. The sort of kids' movie only a deliciously warped adult with a love for the films of his / her youth could make. Funnier, faster, slicker and smarter than the flabby Bond franchise in its entirety.
Xie shuang (1982)
Cockney kung-fu
I bought this brand new for the princely sum of one pound on DVD, so it was bound to make it through to the semis on that basis alone. Although my knowledge of cheap kung-fu is hardly extensive, plot-wise it appears to be nothing new: an evil martial arts school attempts to take over a small village, killing the benevolent head of a security service in the process. Revenge is of course the order of the day, yet, without giving too much away, it's the relatively minor character who lives in the forest and spends all his time training who becomes the pivotal character towards the end of the film.
The all-important fight scenes are solid enough, with enough whip-crack sound effects on the soundtrack to keep anyone happy. The film's alternative title of 'Blood Baby' is explained in a surprisingly macabre pre-credits sequence, although, as is so often the case, the real star of the show here is the dubbing: anyone even slighly villainous finds themselves in possession of an outrageously phony cheeky cock-er-ney accent.
Exactly what is being insinuated about our friends in the capital, I'm not entirely sure, but it makes for damn entertaining viewing nevertheless.
Button Moon (1980)
Trippy...
Yet another programme from my wasted youth, 'Button Moon' maintains a weird power all these years later. As with all the best kids' shows, 'Button Moon' was dedicated to helping its young audience's imaginations sprout from the normalities of everyday life. All the world was a potential playground. Thus, kitchen utensils become the restless Mr Spoon and his family, baked bean tins become spaceships, cardboard boxes become houses. All good staples of a healthy child's imaginative development.
However, this same approach helped give the show a very weird, very trippy atmosphere, ensuring it cult TV status years later. It looks as if it were literally filmed in a dustbin. Bananas fly through the sky with green bean wings; party dresses suffer from depression; umbrellas play golf. In one particularly inspired sequence, Mr Spoon, trapped on top of a squealing Royal Jelly, is rescued by a small army of gingerbread men wielding a ladder constructed from chocolate finger biscuits.
Ineffably English - check out the thinly disguised Heinz logo on the baked-bean tin spaceship, for instance, or the cockney troll in the 'Little Goats Gruff' episode - it features terrific narration by Robin Parkinson, and a theme tune that will haunt you till your dying day. 'Button Moon' is surely the pinnacle of early 1980s English children's psychedelic sci-fi puppetry weirdness.
Pornography: The Musical (2003)
Porn. But not as we know it.
Pornographic musicals are not strictly unheard of - although I haven't seen either, both Jacob Pander's Suck It And See and Bud Townsend's 1976 version of Alice in Wonderland are examples - and, in a strange way, the two genres actually share numerous attributes; beautiful girls, stand-alone performance sequences which disrupt the greater narrative flow, and wilful disregard for 'realism' are key factors in each. It is, perhaps, a shame however that only one of these genres will ever find itself on Sunday afternoon television schedules.
Where Pornography: The Musical really stands out is in its blending of these (apparently) disparate genres with the documentary mode; as anyone who has (and, for that matter, anyone who hasn't) watched any smutty cinema will testify, pornography's detachment from psychological realism is often paramount. In order for these films to work, they can't be realistic portrayals of everyday life. To be fair, Pornography: The Musical isn't porn, and was never designed as such; the filmmakers have gone on record admitting that the whole business unnerves them deeply. (However, Pornography: The Musical has, ironically, more than enough mileage to keep connoisseurs of 'clandestine' cinema happy). This film aims more at being some kind of experimental documentary - candid (and, in at least two cases, surprisingly shocking) interviews with performers from differing parts of the industry, interrupted by segments in which these 'stars' proceed to perform specially-written song-and-dance numbers.
The main problem I had with this was, well, the whole structure seemed somewhat pointless; the recent explosion of television documentaries delving into the world of porn would have seemed to have motivated the filmmakers to creating something fresher and more original, although, in reality, all they did was retread the format of their earlier musical prison-documentary Feltham Sings (2002) in a manner which sadly evokes the desperation of a creative one-trick-pony. Although I am all for artistic expression which exists on the margins of genre and culture, I couldn't help feeling this should have simply been played straight; another porn-documentary may not have set the world alight in excitement, but it would at least have represented a solid, even attempt to understand this world.
As it stands, Pornography: The Musical is wildly uneven at best; the songs' often dark lyrics, penned by the filmmakers, seem at odds with the actual accounts of the performers themselves (only one of whom is less than enthusiastic about her line of work), leaving any intended message garbled and confused. The musical numbers themselves are pretty shoddy, if one is being kind; although generally performed with a definite (amateur) gusto, they are simply too forgettable and cheap-sounding to leave any lasting impact. Although it seems churlish to criticise what ought to be an admirably extreme piece of television on these grounds, if these segments of supposed expressionism are meant to be central to the film's distinctiveness, and we as an audience are meant to find them as interesting as the 'documentary' segments, then a better execution of these sections is surely not too much to ask for.
Faces of Gore (1999)
Wholesome family real-death fun.
Ninety minutes' worth of crushed heads, charred flesh, and exposed entrails in a mondo movie to sate even the hardest, most unbalanced real-death enthusiast. This footage, originating from Asia, is genuinely nauseating stuff - with the exception of a clearly fake interview with a supposed Japanese hitman, and a selection of gore effects from The Necro Files, all images on show are authentic aftermaths of violent sloppy deaths. Only the most crimson-soaked gaping wounds have found their way onto this somewhat dubious collection. To avoid any confusion on the part of the viewer, the film is helpfully divided into three sections; crash, suicide, and murder.
If this all sounds gruellingly serious, well, think again; what makes this film truly shocking is not the footage on show, despite its intensity, but the outrageously juvenile approach to it all. The film's host, a Dr. Vincent Van Gore (sure thing, you guys), looking for all the world like Peter Fonda's bombed-out stoner cousin, is apparently a member of the Institute of Gorenology (!), who has returned from his studies in Japan into the 'Phenomena of Death' carrying his findings in what appears to be an old lady's shopping bag. The narration which plays over these images has to be heard to be believed; burn victims in a train wreck, for instance, would be better off dead as they now have to `live out their lives as badly deformed freaks who no-one would love.' Beavis and Butthead themselves couldn't have put it any better. A teenage boy, having hanged himself over poor marks at school, is referred to as a `self-defeatist who has taken the easy way out'; the narrator quips that, `if only the students in America were this conscientious about maintaining their grade-point averages, we'd have an epidemic of mass suicides on our hands.'
Not that we should take everything we are told here as gospel. A coroner, seen in one of the clips examining a newlywed couple killed in a car smash, is identified as one Mr Sato, a fellow member of the Institute of Goreology who just happens to be a practicing necrophiliac! If there was any remaining doubt over the true 'scientific' level at which Faces of Gore is operating, the narrator's gloating over a naked female corpse - even informing us of the unfortunate young woman's bra size - ought to dispel them at once. Faces of Gore's closest spiritual cousin, it quickly becomes apparent, is South Park: The Movie.
`We know only one thing for certain,' Dr Van Gore tells us, strolling through a cemetery on a sunny afternoon; and that is `that death will come, and whether it's suddenly in a car crash, or slowly from a painful, lingering cancer, it will matter not, for we shall never escape. We will all die, sooner or later.' Surprisingly for this film, never has a truer word been uttered; I guess the most any of us can hope for, then, is that when our time is up, our bodies don't find themselves being paraded and ridiculed on a tape like the Faces of Gore.
Affliction (1996)
Self-destructive cinema at the margins
A scorching, forty-five minute modern mondo with an intense, breakneck focus on self-abuse and sexual and moral deviancy within underground performance art and culture. Live footage of the performances of G G Allin, interviews with banned-from-drawing comic book artist Mike Diana, and a vitriolic ode to mass slaughter courtesy of the masked Full Force Frank, are amongst the film's more noticeable moments.
Mark Hejnar's film successfully recalls the mondo format in its fascination with cultures that deviate from the everyday, and its assumption that this interest will be instinctively shared by the audience. Indeed, a title-card which introduces startling (for the uninitiated, at least) footage of G G Allin defecating on stage and anally masturbating with a banana alludes to this, the title reading 'What You All Came To See.' Mainstream culture may be appalled, but Hejnar nevertheless appears to be goading it into admitting the presence of a grisly fascination. This is often shocking stuff, for sure, yet frequently with an intentional sense of absurdist humour (Diana struggling to make himself vomit, on demand, over a crucifix) that allows greater access into this patchwork of controlled chaos.