Monthly Archives: June 2018

Mondo Topless (1966)

by in To Watch Pile and tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One from the rewatch pile…

Mondo Topless (1966)

Film: You have to love ‘mondo’ movies! Titilation and cheap thrills disguised as serious documentaries by directors looking for a quick buck for a budget price, because stock footage and not having to pay for actors and special effects is cheap cheap cheap!

The most famous of these mondo movies usually feature animal slaughter, executions and bloodshed designed to disgust/ thrill the viewer… but these are NOT the ones for me. I prefer the soft, less violent films that feature what used to be called ‘the fairer sex’ before that became a totally sexist and outdated term. Now this film is certainly a product of its time, and today this type of film wouldn’t be produced and shown at a mainstream cinema, but when this was produced, these types of films, like Teaserama and others, replaced the ‘men’s’ club burlesque shows.

Every fan of exploitation should have a basic knowledge of Russ Meyer: World War 2 combat photographer who couldn’t get a break making ‘legitimate’ movies, who then moved into cheesecake photography for Playboy, and settled on making films, the way he, a self-confessed ‘titman’, wanted to see them. Over his career he made 23 films, the best known being John Waters’ favorite film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! KILL!

Mondo Topless starts as a travelogue of San Francisco, where a nubile naked wonder drives us around town showing us not just the city sights, but a couple of hers as well!! The footage is narrated by John Furlong, a Meyer regular, who introduces the city and each of the well-endowed women as well. Over the next 60 minutes we are treated to the sights of 15 women, performing pulsating pastiches of gyrating go-go, irresistible writhing and thrilling thrusting. The film travels to Europe, visiting various strip joints around the world with accompanying footage of dancers from each country. Also as an added bonus, some stock footage of Lorna Maitland, star of Meyer’s film ‘Lorna’, is also seen in random scenes, showing off her ample assets. The display of dynamic dames with dominating domes is not all the film is about though, each of these marvelously blessed misses has a lot to say about the troubles in their lives: the curse of curvaceousness, their opinions towards men who find them sexy or exciting, what they think of the problems in South America, and the threat of the Cuban missile crisis… Ok, so maybe they DON’T discuss some of those subjects, but at times, their now-dated opinions are hilarious, and to a younger viewer, possibly quite scandalous!

Now rest assured this is no soft core or hard core pornography… no no no!! It is pure go-go, GO!!! This is low-priced kicks at their finest, and filmed by King Leer, the Fellini of the sex industry himself: Russ Meyer, you know these women are going to be filmed at obscure angles aimed to excite!! Not all of the footage in this flick was filmed for this flick; some of it comes from Meyer’s 1963 Europe in the Raw feature, which was essentially the same film, but with only European performers in it. The surf guitar soundtrack is supplied by The Aladdins and is a classic example of its type, to be sure!!

Even though this was banned when it first was released in many countries, it is quite tame by todays ‘pornographic standards’… which I guess is an oxymoron, but you, dear reader, know what I mean!!

I would like to end this review with a quote from Meyer himself which sums up the film perfectly: ‘nothing is obscene providing it is done in bad taste’.

Score: **1/2

Format: This film was reviewed using the Arrow DVD release which is presented in an average 4:3 image that does contain a bit of grain and an occasional artefact. The audio is present in 2.0 stereo and isn’t special but the era of the film, and type of film don’t really lend itself to needed high quality sound.

Score: **

Extras: There is a bunch of really cool extras on this disc, not a huge amount, but a decent set… um… of extras… anyway:

Trailer Reel features trailers for Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Blacksnake, Mudhoney, Vixen, Wild Gals of the Naked West, Supervixens, Beneath the Valley Of The Ultravixens, Cherry, Harry & Rachel and Common-Law Cabin, which is a pretty fair overview of Meyer’s output, though a trailer for ‘Lorna’ was conspicuous by its absence.

Photo Gallery is 18 promotional pics from the film, and whilst I am normally not a fan of this sort of thing, it does show the advertising campaign for the film.

Johnathon Ross: Interview with Russ Meyer sees a very young Johnathon Ross (from 1988) interview the master himself, taken from his series of docos ‘The Incredibly Strange Film Show’. It runs for about 40 odd minutes and is a nice look at his history and a selection of his films. Also featured in this doco are Tura Satana, Roger Ebert and Malcom McClaren.

Score: ****

WISIA: Like all of Meyer’s films it’s not one to sit around and watch with the family, but I have to admit to having seen it several times but not due to the boobs: the dialogue is occasionally hilarious and the lounge music soundtrack is pretty awesome.

Dead Awake (2016)

by in To Watch Pile and tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One from the to watch pile…

Dead Awake (2016)

Film: This film shouted out at me from the shelves of my local store for one reason: how absolutely stupid the title is. I get that throwing the word ‘Dead’ into a title will make most younger (and this older) horror fan stop and check something out, and if it were a term that was actually used in the English language, you know, like Dead End, Dead Stop, Dead Tired, I’d be impressed, but Dead Awake was such a stupid combination I had to check it out.

Then I read the back of the Bluray slick and I find that it’s about sleep paralysis, which is something I find both horrible to think of, and an interesting idea for a horror film, especially when it’s mixed with a little American-styled post-millennial ghost story like Grudge/ Ring/ Darkness Falls/ Boogeyman films that haunted the cinemas in the early 2000s. I’m not really a fan of many films of this period, but for some reason I find I revisit these films occasionally.

This film was written by Jeffrey Reddick, the guy who came up with the concept of the Final Destination movies so it has some positive providence , and directed by Phillip Guzman, who directed A Kiss and a Promise.

When Kate Bowman’s (Jocelyn Donahue) recovering drug-addict sister Beth dies during a sleep paralysis episode, she discovers that perhaps her sister was being haunted by a creature who kills people in their sleep during these episodes.

She meets Beth’s doctor, Dr Davies (Jesse Borego) and at first isn’t convinced of this weird malevolent being bent on killing that he tries to tell her about, until she starts having episodes herself, as does her sister’s boyfriend, Evan (Jesse Bradford… remember Cliff Pantone from Bring It On? THAT guy!).

So Kate and Evan start a trail that starts at a sleep hospital run by Dr. Sykes (Lori Petty) to try and defeat whatever it is that haunts them, but how many people will die along the way, and can this creature, that appears to have existed for centuries, even be destroyed at all?

I really wanted to like this film. The cast are all really well picked, it’s filmed beautifully, the script is ok, but the premise is just so generic.

Dead Awake is a bizarre 80s-nightclub styled megamix of A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Grudge and Ring, that is, the male and female lead of Ring versus a dream monster, who moves like the ghost from The Grudge. It’s not that this is a bad film, it’s just been done before by other films that did it far better. Emulating something is fine, but doing so with no point of originality is detrimental to your product.

To provide a metaphor, this film is the nerd who desperately wants to be a cool kid, but ends up being the kid from the Pretty Fly for a White Guy film clip.

Score: **

Format: Dead Awake was reviewed with the Australian region B Bluray which runs for 99 minutes and is presented in a 2.0:1 image and a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Audio, both of which are immaculate.

Score: *****

Extras: The disc opens with trailers for Revolt, Faults, Eat Local and 13 Sins.unfortunately, that is it for the extras, but those last three films I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for… Revolt, not so much.

Score: *

WISIA: Probably not.

Day of the Dead Bloodline (2018)

by in To Watch Pile and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One from the to watch pile…

Day of the Dead Bloodline (2018)

Film: Another day, another ‘Day’. It seems that a lot of Hollywood need to feed from the undead teat of the late George Romero, and if they screw it up, they give someone else a go. The Night of the Dead remake by Tom Savini was a decent watch, Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead was suitable impressive too, even though it was more of an action film with dead people than a horror film with a message like Romero’s, but remakes of Day have constantly screwed up.

Horror legend Steve Miner’s heart may have been in the right place… in his chest, not on a plate… when he remade Romero’s Day Of The Dead, but it just fell a little short with some odd casting, like Mena Suvari, and Ving Rhames, but playing a different character from that which he played in the Dawn remake… confusing! Next we had Day of the Dead 2: Contagion and here we… actually no, the wounds are still too fresh, even after 13 years… and now we have a brand new, 2018 remake, Day of the Dead Bloodline, with a script by Hush’s Mark Tonderai and Baby Blues’ Lars Jacobson, and directed by The Corpse Of Anna Fritz’s writer/ director Hèctor Hernández Vicens.

The Dead walk, and mankind is screwed! You know the story: when there is no more room in Heck, the Dead walk the earth when something fell from space or something, and mankind is in some deep doodoo.

It’s 5 years latter Day Z, and medical student Zoe (Sophie Skelton) is now one of the medical personnel at a military run refugee camp, filled with army personnel, as well as families. One of the children at the camp gets a strain of influenza that desperately needs anti-biotics that she knows is at the University facility where she was five years ago, so of course, she and a bunch of muscle-bound army men travel off to retrieve it.

The problem is though, when they get there, the place has a small zombie problem, and particularly for Zoe, a creepy dude, who was obsessed with Zoe and had a strange and rare blood type, named Max (Johnathon Schaech) is still residing there. Now, though, he’s a zombie, and due to his weird blood type, he only half-turned and still retains some memory or being alive.

Well, this is the assumption, anyway…

Of course, he is intelligent enough to find a way to break into the facility, and when captured, Zoe convinces Lt. Salazar (Jeff Gum), the boss of the refuge that he may be the key to creating a vaccine to protect mankind from become ‘rotters’ (this film’s word for zombies) and she starts her experiments… but will the refuge survive?

So how bad is this? Well, it’s not. It’s interesting insomuch as there is a real proactive movement towards creating an inoculation which is an interesting aspect to the zombie breakout idea, which yes, has been done before but if you overlook some of the stupid script bits and pieces as a few moments of emotional melodrama, it’s actually works.

Schaech does his rapist freak Bub impression just fine, and Gum’s wound-back version of Captain Rhodes actually works far better as he at no time really becomes a caricature like Joe Plato’s did. The army aren’t the enemy here, they are here to protect us,

The zombies all look pretty good too, and the special effects are of a pretty good quality, but there is one problem with the film.

You can definitely tell this isn’t Romero’s Dead World is it all looks new. The story tells us it’s 5 years after the Dead first came back, but everything: the military vehicles, the guns, the uniforms, all look like they were unpacked yesterday. Also, even though supplies are getting thin, everyone at the refugee camp looks like a catalogue model: clean skin, even tan, manicured beard/ hair… thank Revlon a decent hairdresser/ waxer survived the zombie apocalypse.

This is where the suspension of disbelief gene that all movie fans have, fails. I don’t like comparing originals to remakes, but the grit and filth of the facility in the abandoned mine in the original gave a sense of realism, whereas even though the zombies look fine in this, it’s all Ikea fresh. Even the abandoned towns don’t look TOO abandoned, and a little like a movie set.

This is an Ok zombie film, and is more like a sequel to the Snyder Dawn with its slick presentation. I’ve actually seen many worse zombie films than this, and two of them were also called Day of the Dead.

Score: ***

Format: Day of the Dead: Bloodline runs for approximately 90 minutes, and this review was performed on the Australian, region B Bluray which has a perfect 2.35:1 image and an DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 of matching quality.

Score: *****

Extras: There is a single extra on this disc called Behind the Scenes is a 5 minutes fluff pieces which pays homage to Romero’s original work, but quickly turns into a self-congratulatory thing. Interesting one of the producers says ‘we are not trying to replace Romero’… so why not call your film ‘Military Hospital Of The Dead’ or ‘Blood Type Z’ or something.

Score: **

WISIA: Aside from how stupidly new it looks, it’s good enough to watch again, even though the end may be a little… well, really schmaltzy, but it’s certainly a different ending for a zombie film, that’s for sure.

Black Panther (2018)

by in To Watch Pile and tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One from the to watch pile…

Black Panther (2018)

Film: Now even though this is technically a rewatched film, I’m going to label it a To Watch Piler… why? Well I received a free ticket to see this at the cinema, and unfortunately it was a Mum’s and Bubs session, which means the house lights were on the whole time, so any scene that takes place at night is almost unseeable, especially when the lead cast member is wearing all black!

Black Panther is one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, which all join together in a story ten years in the making which will all be resolved in 2019’s sequel to Avengers: Infinity War. Black Panther has been an important character in the Marvel comics universe since his first appearance in Fantastic Four comics in 1966, and has been an important member of not just that team, but also the Avengers as well as having several impressive comics series’ himself.

The film was directed by Creed director Ryan Coogler from a script that he co-wrote with Amber Lake’s Joe Robert Cole, and what they created caused a massive bag of excitement for its positive role models.

Black Panther tells of the country of Wakanda’s new King T’challa (Chadwick Boseman), who has ascended to the throne after the death of his father (in the film Captain America: Civil War) but the road to his regency isn’t smooth.

First, whilst being watched by his people, including his mother Ramona (Angela Bassett), potential wife Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and sister Shuri (Letitia Wright – the real revelation of this film), he must prove his worth as a leader in battle, but all the while, machinations are happening outside of Wakanda that may still threaten his rule.

A man calling himself Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) has teamed up with arms dealer Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) but what is there nefarious plan, and how does it effect the rule of the Black Panther.

This film initially reminds me of a superheroic version of a James Bond film, much like Captain America: The Winter Soldier did. It has exotic locations, improbable inventions and a wry sense of humour as Boseman performs his African James Bond alongside Wright’s ‘Q’ and Forrest Whitaker’s ‘M’ as they face off against an eccentric bad guy with a sidekick with a bizarre weapon, not to mention a bevy of women, all of whom are defined by their skill, brains and asskickery rather than their looks.

The design of the film is magnificent: quite possibly the best a Marvel film to date has to offer, and the colours jump from the screen and are a nice tribute to the beauty of many African cultures, but occasionally the CGI effects fail. Ok, they don’t actually fail, but there is a standard of effects that some blockbuster films seem to think is ok which occasionally don’t sit right, due to the physics of gravity or the extension limits the human body has. I get it’s a movie based on a comic, but if you are selling it as real, it shouldn’t look like a comic. Also, there is some CGI animals that just don’t look quite right.

Ultimately, the one thing I find about this film that doesn’t work is it’s just an introduction. The Black Panther storyline is reminiscent of the first Iron Man’s story of the rights of ascension in a technological world, and serves really as just frosting on the cake that is actually film that could be called Wakanda: A Prelude to Infinity War, as it sets up one of the battlefields for the next Avengers movie, just as the first Thor and Captain America films were really just a way of getting the punter ready for a more complete film experience with the first Avengers film.

In saying that though, I don’t want to discount the amazing work it did with having a sympathetic bad guy and a great set of role models for various groups that in pop culture don’t get as many as the white male population.

This film, even though it is a fun film, in 100% sticking to the Marvel formula so if you are expecting TOO much different from the stations that the hype train stopped at whilst this film was at the cinemas, you will be disappointed.

Score: ***

Format: This film is presented in an impeccable 16:9 image with a matching DTS-HDMA 7.1 audio which is absolutely amazing.

Score: *****

Extras: As one expects with Marvel films, they have a pack of extras ready to role, some about this film, and others to advertise other product, but why wouldn’t you do that with a captured audience?

There is a Featurettes section which contains 4 parts: Crowning a New King which looks at the character of Black Panther and his world, The Hidden Kingdom Revealed is an introduction to the fictional African nation of Wakanda and making it a ‘real’ place, The Warriors Within looks at the actors who play the various Wakandans throughout the film and finally, Wakanda Tevealed: Exploring the Technology looks at the cool toys in the film.

The usual Marvel Gag Reel is present which seem to get less and less funny each time, as the actors seem to almost be acting the gags.

There is four Deleted Scenes which, like the rest of the film, are quite charming, and honestly, whilst I normally think most deleted scenes are better off deleted, there are a couple of bits here that have some heart that would not have hurt the film at all.

From Page to Screen: A Roundtable Discussion is a really cool look at all the writers of the character, including not just the movie creators, but also comic writers like Don McGregor, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christopher Priest.

Marvel Studios:The First Ten Years – Connecting The Universe is the first of the Marvel sales pitches on this disc of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There is no doubt it is extraordinarily clever and it is pretty cool when any series of films have a linking world, like Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse and more importantly, Universal’s monster movies of the 40s that had multiple crossovers in the form of House of Dracula and House of Frankenstein. This is a fine albeit short celebration and for a moment, you look at all these separate movies as one big story, rather than a series of films with a, to date, continually unresolved plot device as it’s connective tissue.

Exclusive Sneak Peek at Antman and the Wasp is another one of those aforementioned self-promotional pieces that shows off the next attraction coming to the ci emas, in this case, Antman and the Wasp. The first movie was so charming that I actually am really looking more forward to this that either the sequel to Infinity War or my beloved Captain Marvel movie (in which I believe the main character has been miscast, but prove me wrong, Marvel).

There is also an Audio Commentary by writer/ director Coogler and production designer Hannah Beachler is fascinating as it doesn’t talk about the usual writer/ director stuff, it also explores the design of the entire world of Black Panther and Wakanda.

Score: *****

WISIA: As it is a part of the greater world of the Marvel movies, I will watch it again, but it’s not a top tier Marvel movie for me.