November 2009: MUTO by BLU

This amazing film by the Italian artist BLU is “an ambiguous animation painted on public walls” filmed in Buenos Aires (Brazil) and in Baden (Germany). An amazing technical and visual feat, the film comes across less as an animated film than as the documentation of a painting that never stops developing and changing – although more than one beautiful image is lost to the further development of the piece itself. BLU has a pretty interesting website that invites one to peruse and look around, but it supplies relatively concrete info about the man himself, who obviously gets around a lot as a street artist. Some fine examples of his murals – including the big one here in Berlin that I often go by when riding the subway – can be found here.

Monster Man (USA, 2003)

"Dude I think you just ate somebody."

Prior to Monster Man, director Michael Davis gained his experience by directing a variety of mostly lame and forgettable teen-exploitation sex comedies, namely Eight Days a Week (1997 / trailer), 100 Girls (2000 / trailer) and Girl Fever (2002 / trailer). Not exactly an auspicious past for a director to have when it comes to making a successful gore comedy, and, in fact, after roughly the first half-hour of Monster Man the viewer is pretty much convinced that Michael Davis definitely tackled the wrong genre for his fifth directorial attempt. But then, something unexpected happens! Monster Man becomes just the type of trash that makes for a fun beer-drenched night with the guys. And in no short order it becomes easy to understand how Davis then went on to make a much more tasteful but just as fun A-budget B-film like Shoot 'Em Up (2007 / trailer).
Much like his lame sex comedies, the lead males of Monster Man are geeks, the type of guys that you’d only invite to a party ‘cause you feel sorry for them. Adam (Eric Jungmann, last seen in Killer Pad [2008/ trailer]) is driving across country to the wedding of Betty-Ann, the great love that got away. Unbeknownst to him, is old bud Harley (Justin Urich, last seen in Lake Placid 2 [2007 / trailer]), an overweight and obnoxious loudmouth, has stowed away in the back seat. Buds being buds, after a lot of unfunny stuff they continue the journey together, during which they do and say a lot of other unfunny stuff which is meant to be funny – a running joke about a minor piece of trivia regarding the supposed true meaning of the name "Rosebud" as originally revealed by Gore Vidal in 1989 and repeated in The American Experience, a 1996 documentary, for example, is dragged out like a month of Sunday School lectures.
Things pick up, however, as of the rather tasteless scene combining roadkill with Harley’s dreaming that he's going down on non-waxed women; at that point, the film takes the right turn off the road straight into fine and unrepentant trash tastelessness and gore. And once the two dudes pick-up the unrealistically hot hitchhiker Sarah (Aimee Brooks, whose film debut at the age of 12 was Sorority House Massacre [1986 / trailer] and whose last film of note is The Mangler Reborn [2005 / trailer]) with her push-up bra and high-heel boots and the three then get lost on backroads populated only by amputated hillbillies, the film finally turns into something truly funny and hilariously gory.
OK, the film isn’t as consistently excessive in tastelessness and gore as, say, vintage Peter Jackson – basically his first three films: Bad Taste (1987 / trailer), Meet the Feebles (1989 / trailer) and the classic Braindead (1992 / trailer) – but once director Michael Davis introduces a monster truck driven by a monster man and finally tones down on the un-funny frat-house banter and ups the dosage of violence and blood, Monster Man achieves a consistent hilarity and vulgarity that truly saves the film. It’s just a shame that Aimee Brooks obviously had a no-nudity clause in her contract, for the film’s only sex scene never even gets her fully out of her clothes, much less her bra.
In short, Monster Man is an odd combination of frat boy road movie and psycho trucker film that veers off at the end into the territory of in-bred killer hillbillies, all the while serving up big portions of bad-taste humour and more than enough blood and gore. Much like a kettle of cold water on a hot stove, the flick takes awhile to get hot, but once it boils it boils.

Uncle Sam (USA, 1997)

A forgettable entry of the body-count genre that could have and should have been much more than what it is, considering the men steering the product, the dynamic duo of Larry Cohen – the man behind such fine slime as Black Caesar (1973 / trailer), Hell Up in Harlem (1973 / trailer), It's Alive (1974 / trailer), God Told Me To (1976 / trailer), Q: The Winged Serpent (1982 / trailer), The Stuff (1985 / trailer) and much, much more – and William Lustig – the man behind The Violation of Claudia (1977) (as Billy Bagg), the ultra-misogynistic Maniac (1980 / trailer), Vigilante (1983 / trailer), Maniac Cop (1988 / trailer), Maniac Cop 2 (1990 / trailer) and Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (1993 / trailer). In truth, however, the blame for the film's failure probably lies more with Mr Cohen than Mr Lustig, for it is the tale itself and not the direction that is lacking.
The concept itself – a homicidal Desert Storm trooper killed in action by friendly fire comes back from the dead to kill the unpatriotic (and anyone else he sees fit) during a July 4th celebration in his hometown – is rather nifty and should have been a perfect vehicle for some sublime social criticism, great slaughter and entertaining laughs, but even if the social criticism remains present due to the plot alone, the laughs also remain relatively few and both the narrative and the slaughter veers way too often into the dilettantish (a man who dies from a bee-bee gunshot in the head?). And the entire subplot of a wheelchair-bound boy with a sudden psychic connection to the marauding un-dead Uncle Sam pretty much manages to push the flick off the deep end into the realm of total crap, despite a number of above-average performances by most of the cast, a few inspired deaths and Lustig's smart directorial eye.
Uncle Sam opens in the Persian Gulf (California, actually) where the Sam Harper (David Fralick) sits dead in the burnt remains of his machine, which was shot down by friendly fire. Though dead, he undeads long enough to kill a few military men on-site as he quips "Don't be afraid, it's only friendly fire." Move forward a couple of months to some summertime California town where kids still attend school in July, Sam’s burnt and mummified body is returned to his family and his casket set up for mourning in the living room (they sure must have some damn good air freshener). Sam's nephew Jody Baker (Christopher Ogden), a definite future Republican and NRA member, is about the only person that misses the man and regrets his death, but in no time flat his scorched Uncle Sam (now played by the unrecognisable B-movie king William Smith) crawls forth from his casket to do his American duty of killing everyone who doesn’t meet his approval. The scene in which he gains his Uncle Sam costume, taken from a peeping tom on stilts (the image left shows him in action), is probably the most surreally effective of the film (while the later death of a policeman is the most affective), but little of the film as a whole holds either water or the attention of the viewer. OK, perhaps the concept of 'holding water' is immaterial when talking of a film about a homicidal dead soldier that revives for no reason and then leaves a trial of bodies behind him, but why the psychic kid? And, really, an ornamental canon that still shoots real cannon balls? (That, seemingly, the average vet janitor with a gimp leg [the late, great Isaac Hayes] has a handful of.) And while we all know cars explode at the tap of a bumper, since when do houses explode when hit by a cannon ball?
Any film that makes the viewer glance at the DVD timer to see how much longer it’s going to go on is a failure, and Uncle Sam definitely causes one to do so. OK, there are worse films out there – anything starring Richard Grieco, for example, as Webs (2003) or Raiders of the Damned (2005), to name but two of his films, both amply demonstrate – but one has expectations when the names Larry Cohen and William Lustig head the credits. And with the exception of the fluid camera work – and a cast of interesting genre names (including Bo Hopkins, P.J. Soles and Robert Preston) – Uncle Sam really doesn’t fulfil any of them.

October 2009: How Pregnancy Happens - The Fun Way

Time for a real educational video. What the hell, they’re film, too. I really can't recall any of the Sex Ed films that I ever saw in school as being as funny as this one, but then, who knows if this one ever got shown in a public school. This little animated gem was made for Planned Parenthood by flickerlab, a politically correct communications firm with a fun sense of humour that have done all sorts of groovy and entertaining shorts and stuff for firms like the American Heart Association (The Bad Fat Brothers) and Proctor & Gamble or shows like the Colbert Report. Among the four managing partners and creative directors of flickerlab is Harold Moss, who did the fabulous short A Brief History of the USA for Bowling for Columbine (2003/trailer).

Meatball Machine (Japan, 2005)

Another great film from the home country of Issei Sagawa... that be Japan, for those of you who don't know who he is.
The not-yet-infamous Fundoshi Corps is a Japanese exploitation firm specializing in cheap Japanese school girl soft-core (?), horror anthologies, and a whole slew of machine-based horror. Among the fun stuff they have regurgitated is Robo-Geisha (2009 / trailer), Unholy Woman (2006 / trailer), The Machine Girl (2008 / trailer) and this baby, an interesting little film called Meatball Machine. The 2005 feature-length version of Meatball Machine, supposedly directed in tandem by Yûdai Yamaguchi (the man behind Battlefield Baseball [2003 / trailer]) and Jun'ichi Yamamoto, is a low budget remake of an even lower budget short film by Jun'ichi Yamamoto alone from 1999 also entitled Meatball Machine. Some DVDs out there are said to include both films; regrettably the one watched for this review did not. So who knows to what extent this newer, longer version is different, but considering how fucking great the 2005 version is, it is hard to believe that the short one can be any better. (Sometimes, size does matter.)
This time around, oddly enough, the script is credited to Junya Kato alone, who also scribed the genre-mix Death Trance (2005/ trailer). The film tells the tale of a young milquetoast factory worker named Joji (Issei Takahashi), a wimpy virgin, who secretly yearns for the young Sachiko (Aoba Kawai), a woman he often watches hang wash on the other side of the canal during his lunch break. Unknown to them – and the rest of Japan, obviously enough – parasites that look oddly reminiscent of an horseshoe crab are on the loose in the neighborhood, turning their hosts into ugly mutants called "Neoborgs". (Where the name comes from is obvious enough, especially midway through the film when one character flatly states "Resistance is futile".) The Neoborgs are killing machines that do nothing but kill anyone that crosses their path. But much like in The Highlander (1986 / trailer), they prefer to kill their own kind; only, instead of absorbing energy of the defeated dead in a cheap light show, the winning Neoborg bloodily rip the controlling parasite out of the neck of the dead Neoborg and eats it for lunch. (We get to see one such battle before the credits even roll, when a parasite converts a would-be suicide and, shortly thereafter, first splits open the head of another Neoborg and then dines in a shower of red blood.)
After a failed attempt at losing his cherry with a prostitute, Joji ends up saving Sachiko from being raped by his boss. Later, as the two would-be lovebirds begin to get to know each other back at Joji's flat, Sachiko gets attacked and converted by a parasite in a scene that brings to mind the wonderfully tasteless death of Dr. Barbara Glaser (June Chadwick) in that sleaze sci-fi classic Forbidden World (1982 / trailer). (One wonders when the first horror film will come out using the same concept but with men and the rear door.) Soon thereafter, Joji is likewise infected, but he manages to prevent full transformation and sets out to save Sachiko. But all Sachiko wants is lunch…
Meatball Machine is very much a descendent of Shinya Tsukamoto’s industrial art-splatter B&W films Testuo: Iron Man (1989 / trailer) and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992 / trailer), but in full colour, less artistic pretensions and a lot more blood, guts and latex. It is a film that easily leads to you to cocking your eye in amazement as you wonder just what the fuck did you put in the DVD player. In other words, Meatball Machine is some pretty fine gonzo trash from Japan.… No CGI, good old cheap and sleazy low budget blood and guts with inferred sex and cannibalism.
The film ends with a nihilistic twist that doesn’t really hold water but is good for a laugh. Meatball Machine is not an art film – it is far more Accion Mutante (1993) than Eraserhead (1977 / trailer) – but for fans of glibbery gross-out violence and immature humour, it is an industrial blood bath well worth visiting.