Museum of the Dead/Zombie Attack (2004)

One of the hardest things to believe about this "movie" from 2004 is that "director" James Glenn Dudelson has supposedly "directed" some seven other films, for at best Museum of the Dead comes across as a freshman film project of a talentless student whose rich parents bought his way into a fifth-rate film school – and even in the most undemanding of film schools, the project would have gotten an F-. Seldom does a film get made that is as bereft of any likeable quality as is this one – one can only wonder why it was ever even made in the first place. No story, no characterization, crappy acting, crappy music, crappy CGI, crappy make-up, crappy sets, lousy dubbing... but, worst of all, as shitty as the film is, it isn't even enjoyable as a bad film. In comparison to the talent displayed by James Glenn Dudelson in this film, Jim Wynorski displays the talent of a Stanley Kubrick in any given movie of his entire oeuvre (Vampirella included).
The minimal plot concerns two girls – one blond and ditzy, one brunette and serious (Tanya Vidal – obviously so ashamed of the flick that, at the time this review is being written, she doesn't even list it her IMDB filmography) – who decide to go to a once-a-year special opening of the Museum of the Dead on Halloween. Once inside, they wander around a maze of corridors (actually only one corridor filmed from different angles) and cheap sets until zombies start attacking. In-between, some ghostly cannibal savage keeps popping up to attack and kill people, and two spear-carrying Egyptian female warriors also make a guest appearance for no logical reason. Other museum guests show up for a few seconds at a time only to promptly get attacked and turned into zombies. Among the few guests that are given a little extra time are a fat buddy of the two babes, a “good” thief out to steal a certain museum piece so as to return it to its rightful owners and some cops answering the serious girl’s mobile phone call for help (of course, after that first call, she drops and loses the phone). The twist ending is ridiculous.
To talk about what makes Museum of the Dead a crappy film is easy. What is impossible, however, is to find one redeemable quality in the film – and that says a lot, considering some of the positive words that other bad films on this website get. Avoid this direct-to-DVD filmic abortion at all costs, for Museum of the Dead is truly one of those rare films that has no redeemable qualities at all – even as a project based on the concept of keeping starving actors off of welfare, this film remains an unforgivable insult to the world as a whole. Forget about buying this piece of shit – and if anyone ever gives you this movie, you should slap their face!

La Peau Blanche/White Skin (Canada, 2004)

(Spoilers everywhere.) At one point in White Skin (also briefly known as Cannibal), first-time director Daniel Roby alludes to an obvious role model by showing some of his characters watching David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977/Trailer) on TV. Rabid is, of course, a Canadian venereal horror classic and both the film and its director are fine paragons to emulate or honor, but as adroit as Roby's direction is, White Skin comes nowhere close to Croneberg’s classic in any way. Rabid was and is a highly interesting and truly depressing shocker that inter-mingles sex and horror and proudly stood to its exploitation roots by casting a then-famous porno star (Marylyn Chambers) in the lead; White Skin might also mix sex with horror and be a slight downer, but in its endeavor to be more arthouse than grindhouse it never becomes either. Neither truly shocking nor as interesting as Cronenberg’s second feature length film, in the end White Skin — or rather, La Peau Blanche (the original French-language title) — remains dissatisfying and almost annoying. Slow enough to be a television movie of the week, White Skin might look good but it crawls leadenly to an in-parts predictable and in-parts unbelievable ending that seems much more a whimper than a punch... and a variety of incompletely though-out aspects, half-baked social commentary on race, and uninteresting characterization don’t help any. Once again, a film’s trailer is indefinitely much more alluring and interesting than the film itself.
Based on the novel by Joël Champetier, La Peau Blanche begins on the birthday of Thierry Richard (Marc Paquet), a young country boy who has come to the big city of Montreal on a scholarship. To celebrate, his Afro-Canadian bud and roommate Henri Dieudonné (Frédéric Pierre) invites him to a hooker. Later at the hotel the two youths take their respective ladies of the night into separate rooms, but before Thierry can get past his performance problems he hears his friend’s desperate shouts for help coming from the room next door. Rushing to Henri's room, he finds his pal with a half-slit neck struggling with the knife-wielding whore who then breaks away and escapes through the window into the night. Later, to hide the fact that they had been with hookers, Henri explains his throat injury to a skinhead knife attack, which instigates an impromptu reunion of his extended and enraged circle of family and friends. (Where are all these people at the end of the film after both he and his Aunt Marie-Pierre (Joujou Turenne) die? In fact, how does the apartment he and Thierry share get cleaned after the bloodbath that occurs there? Three bodies and a lot of blood and brains obviously simply dissolve into thin air.) Soon thereafter Thierry — who at one point explains why he finds redheads repulsive — falls obsessively in love with a redhead music student named Claire Lefrançois (Marianne Farley) with whom he has wild sex but who claims not to want to have a relationship because she’s deathly ill with “cancer.” Henri eventually sees her licking out a condom and figures out with the help of the Internet that she is a succubus, but of course Thierry refuses to believe him. (Why she just doesn’t blow Henri when she’s hungry is a mystery. Aside from the fact that no man says no to a woman that swallows, the liquid protein wouldn’t have that funny rubber taste either. In regard to what a succubus actually is, the filmmakers seem rather confused: a succubus is a female demon or specter which, like its male counterpart the incubus, drains the life forces of its victims through sex, not by drinking its victim’s blood or eating its flesh – or ejaculate, for that matter.) In truth, however, Claire is not dying of cancer, but of malnutrition: she and her ilk need the blood and flesh of human males to survive, but as she no longer wants to actively partake in her required food chain and is thus not eating as she should, she is pining slowly away. (One can thus assume that Claire’s racist dislike of black people has less to do with simple racism than that they are a greater temptation because, as it is revealed at one point, they are the most “undiluted” of the races. But then, if she and her siblings are indeed the next step up on the evolutionary ladder — as one of her sisters eventually claims — perhaps she simply dislikes those at the bottom. The race aspect of the film, for all the lauds given, often seems oddly half-baked.) The shit starts hitting the fan when Thierry visits Claire in hospital, meets the rest of her family and realizes that one of her sisters is the very lady-of-the-night that tried to kill Henri. Not only that, but she makes it plain to him that she plans to finish the job. Feeling the heat, Henri buys himself a gun for protection, but it doesn’t help much: he soon follows Claire’s doctor into her mother’s deep freezer. (Odd how when Henri buys the gun he pointedly puts on gloves so as not to leave fingerprints, but the rest of the time he simply has it in his bare hands.) And Claire, for some inexplicable reason, gets pissed at her sister for killing him and blows her brains out. (Feel free to say “Huh?” here, ‘cause me and my buds sure did when we were watching the film... although two out four of us did predict the final “surprise” ending that closes the film correctly.)
That the film is well shot and edited is without a doubt, but all the good press it gets is nonetheless not very understandable. Illogical, slow and dull, White Skin meanders from horror to social commentary to teenager-in-love to suspense and to the corner and back without ever feeling like it really knows whither it wants to go to. In the end, all the good press and word-of-mouth gives one the feeling that one should like the film, but the film itself gives one the feeling that there ain’t much there to like.
One should really re-watch Rabid instead.

Fantastic Planet (1973)

(Trailer)
An interesting French-Czechoslovakian animation co-production written by Roland Topor (the man behind The Tenant (1976) and Marquis (1989)), directed by Rene Laloux and brought to the USA by Roger Corman and his New World Pictures after it won a Grand Prix at Cannes. Following its short release, the film pretty much fell off the face of the earth and got forgotten, though it is was available on DVD for a time in the mid-90s. How much the dubbed English adds to or changes the original French version is unknown to this reviewer, as he has yet to watch a subtitled version. (The French title is La Planète sauvage, which actually translates into "The Savage Planet," so some deviation is likely.) Currently (June 2008) rumor has it that Fantastic Planet is due either to be remade or rereleased soon.
On a planet that obviously is earth long after some major catastrophe, human beings, called Oms, have been reduced to an existence comparable to intelligent mice, the planet now being dominated by the Drogs, huge humanoids of advanced intelligence. The film narrates the story of an Om taken in as a pet by a child Drog after his mother is killed by other Drog children playing with her as one does with a bug. (If the Om's voice sounds familiar, it's because it's supplied by Barry Bostwick, a good three years before he donned black stockings for The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) Accidentally gaining Drog knowledge by (initially) unintentionally connecting himself to the Drog child’s education headband which transfers all knowledge directly and permanently to the brain, the diminutive Rhodes Scholar eventually runs away. Taking the headband with him, he joins up with the wild Oms living in the city park. There he fights for and gains acceptance, only to be driven from the park with other survivors of both his and another enemy tribe when the Drogs decide to exterminate the little "pests." Taking refuge in a deserted Drog rocket factory, the now super-intelligent Oms build spaceships to fly to the moon, where they hope to set up a new life free of the deadly shadow of extermination by the Drogs. Succeeding their goal, the airborne Oms reach the moon only to discover that the satellite is the mystical fuck-pad of the Drogs, the location where the Master Race unite sexually for their reproduction and survival...
An anomalous, dreamlike curiosity, the movie's static animation serves only to emphasize its overall peculiarity. The scriptwriters let their imagination run wild, and more often than not the events extraneous to the story amaze as much as the film itself, despite the fact that the story is too full of holes and lapses in logic to really hold water. Probably a bit too slow and artsy for most people, Fantastic Planet is nonetheless a highly enjoyable curio indefinitely more interesting than the animated crap found on television that actually deserves both rediscovery and reappraisal. Look for it.

Scanners II: The New Order (Canada, 1991)

(Spoilers) Ten years after David Cronenberg released his infamous splatter-classic Scanners (1981) the first of numerous follow-ups finally reached the big screen. In his first theatrical release, Christian Duguay does a passable job with Scanners II: The New Order (Trailer), though the film shows relatively little of the craftsmanship he was to demonstrate later in Live Wire (1992) or the indefinitely better Screamers (1995). For a cheap B-film, Scanners II is competently made, tight in both style and narrative structure. And, as unobtrusive and lacking-in-personality as the hero David Kellum (David Hewlett) is, he is still much more interesting and likeable than the talentless Stephan Lack, who almost ruined Cronenberg's film with his lackluster portrayal of the Good Scanner.
In no way an essential movie, Duguay's film is a low-budget coming of age film spiced up with exploding heads, flying bodies and a few deformed faces, perfectly okay for some winter Sunday afternoon when nothing better is available.

The basic idea remains the same as in Scanners – in fact, the basic plot (good scanner vs. bad scanner and a nasty bigwig pulling strings in the background) is almost identical. Due to some medication taken by pregnant mothers to calm their nerves (but obviously not Distaval or Talimol or Nibrol or Sedimide or Quietoplex or Contergan or Neurosedyn or Softenon or Whateveritwascalledinyourhomecountry), their children (and the children of their children, in David's case) are gifted with special psychokinetic powers. We learn in the opening scenes of the movie, after the police come and sedate Drak (Raoul Trujillo), a scanner gone bonkers in a pinball arcade, that the government is keeping known scanners under control in a secret compound by getting them addicted to some heroin-like drug. Nice guy David Kellum gets unmasked as a scanner when he is caught on video wiping out two would-be robbers after they bruise his non-scanner girlfriend Julie (Deborah Raffin). Commander John Forrester (Yvon Ponton), a Machiavellian megalomaniac out to form a "New Order" in government convinces David to assist him. Once David becomes a Doubting Thomas, Forrester frames the lad for the murder of the governor and then has the farmer boy's adoptive parents shot. Learning that he has a sister, David hooks up with her and, by "possessing" the mind of one of the bad guys, they learn of the basement full of scabby scanner hop-heads. For the big showdown they break into the compound to free their fellow scanners before David, with the help of all the scanner junkies, finally defeats Drak. Then the press arrives and Forrester's dastardly plot is revealed and ruined, and after he tries one last time to kill David, the scanners get pissed off and deform his head. The End.
At least until the following year, when Duguay directed Scanners III: The Takeover.