Karaoke Terror/Shôwa kayô daizenshû (Japan, 2003)

(Trailer.) Based on a novel by Ryû Murakami, the man who penned the book source of Takashi Miike's infamous 1999 film Ôdishon/Audition, Karaoke Terror is one of those type of films one either loves or hates but that, no matter what one's personal reaction might be, remains etched in one's memory. (Miike, in turn, seems to have been an inspiration to the novel's author, for the ending of Karaoke Terror definitely calls to mind another of Miike's more infamous films—also a revenge story of sorts—that shall be left unnamed here.)
Karaoke Terror narrates a spiraling intensity of violence between two warring factions—a group of male twenty-something slackers and a group of divorced, middle-aged women all named Midori, all of whom are fans of karaoke—that escalates to the point of pure surreality. The film is at various times silly, disturbing, hilarious, sickening and even serious, but most of all, it is simply insane. In other words, a truly great mind-fuck of a film that, despite its clearly evident satirization of Japanese social attitudes, wallows so deeply in its own ridiculousness that it can be enjoyed as a simple exploitive level.
Karaoke Terror starts out focusing on a group of dudes that really have nothing much in common except their love of karaoke, which they do in full gear and with wild stage shows for an audience of no one other than themselves. One day, the swinging butt of one of the middle-aged Midoris catches the attention of the sleepy-eyed slacker who always carries a knife with him for no particular reason. Following her home, he asks her for a fuck and is so insulted that she is insulted by his request (and, worse, turns him down) that he slits her throat and leaves her to die gushing blood in the rain. She, in turn, is found by one of the other Midori who is on her way home from work, where one of her male coworkers responds to her kindness of sharing her umbrella in the rain by asking her if she would like to fuck. (When she is shocked, his response is that the question makes "6 out 8 women get wet".) The police are helpless to find the killer, while the response of the killer's friends when he tells them of his deed and shows them his bloody knife is that of mild interest and not shock or outrage. The Midoris, however, are not as helpless as the police and in no time they not only find out the identity the killer, but also know that every day at the same time he pisses against the wall of a girls' school. An eye for an eye, slacker one is soon dead, but then the remaining slackers decide that a tooth for a tooth, they must revenge the death of their friend. The body count grows, and the technology of the assaults increases with each fallen person until, well, a final solution is achieved and the sole survivor can once again sleep peacefully.
The more feminist-minded viewers will probably find the Midoris the more understandable (and thus likeable) of the two factions, especially since the film so clearly and consistently presents how little respect "women of that certain age" seem to get in Japan. The slackers are simply slackers and, as such, could change their situation any time they choose to—as is evident in reality by any number of real life slackers gone yuppie. The women, on the other hand, are pretty much stuck in the boat their society puts them in. Likewise, the slackers never really seem to grow or develop personally by the events that occur (other than to get increasingly bloodthirsty), while the actions definitely and obviously lead to personal growth in the women that transcends their initial bloodlust. In the end, however, whether or not the viewer even needs to consciously consider the statements and criticism presented in Karaoke Terror is arguable: Although a film of obvious social criticism, the interpretation of which could easily fill pages, the truth of the matter is that most people will enjoy this enjoyably trashy oddity for the giddy excesses of the black humor, and not for the statements it makes about contemporary Japanese society.
A sublimely ridiculous black comedy that very much panders to the cult-movie sensibility, Karaoke Terror clearly deserves more attention than it has had to date.

Primeval (USA, 2007)

(Trailer.) The first feature-length film of long-time television director Michael Katleman, Primeval is a greater whole than the sum of its parts; one of those films that should annoy far more than it does, that should be far worse than it is. (A feat of note, considering that the film also features Jürgen Prochnov, an actor whose involvement is usually a sure sign of no quality.) The basic concept of Primeval is extremely familiar, and one can easily imagine that the film was first pitched as “Well, imagine Lake Placid (1999/trailer) in Africa…." But this initial impression is wrong, for Katleman's film is in-part based on true fact: There is indeed a legendary man-eater swimming the waters of Burundi's Rusizi River and Lake Tanganyiki that should be some 20 feet long and weigh 2,000 pounds; it supposedly even kills people just for the fun of it, and not out of hunger. (Full story here.)

In any event, the somewhat schizophrenic screenplay by the writing team John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris—the duet behind the scripts to such undisputed masterpieces (not) as Cat Woman (2004/trailer) and Terminator 3:Rise of the Machines (2003/trailer)—actually manages retain one’s interest despite the slow beginning, some lulls in the action, and occasional predictability. To the film’s advantage, the dialogue is even mildly funny at times (with Orlando Jones as Steven Johnson usually having the best delivery and best lines), and the 93-minute running length even flits by at a decent speed. But then director Katleman is a man of obvious experience, for his fluid and well-paced direction does wonders for the flow of the film, even if he does seem to lose control of the editing scissors whenever there is a big action scene, most of which are more appearance than substance, although there are a few bloody highpoints that might make more than one viewer cringe.

In Primeval, South Africa stands in for Burundi, one of the ten poorest countries in the world, where an estimated 250,000 people died between 1962 and 1993, and the locations are often as fabulous as the filmmaker’s use of filters. The plot is familiar: Three stereotypical characters (news reporters) go to Burundi to catch Gustave the killer croc on film. Hooking up with the grizzled poacher (Prochnov), a Crocodile-Dundy-type zoologist and a local orphan youth, the shaky political climate explodes around them when they catch the murder of the local wise man by the warlord called Little Gustave on film. Before they know what’s happening, both Gustaves are hot on their asses and one-by-one most of those expected to die do so...

Primeval gets a few brownie points for trying to inject some liberal politicizing in what is basically a killer-croc B-film. (They may have not done it all too well, but at least they tried.) As always with contemporary B-films, however, the babe (Brooke Langton as Aviva Masters) remains spectacularly underused. She might look good in her "tight-fitting, midriff-baring top, and bum-tight pants," but damn it, Primeval is by nature a trash film, and trash films by nature require more naked flesh—and this film doesn’t have any. Not even naked African babes dancing around the campfire. Even during the attempted rape scene, when the big bad man rips off Aiviva's tight top, he somehow manages to leave her white sports bra unscathed. (Now how would this scene have been handled in the 70s, the Golden Age of Exploitation? No bra, no shirt, and the entire fight scene done topless—Now that’s good trash filmmaking!) No brownie points for Primeval here, in any event...

Final verdict: Primeval is well-produced but inconsequential, a film that is inferior to many, but better than even more. If it’s cold and raining outside, you could do worse.

Blood Ties (USA, 1991)

Back in 1983, Jim McBride created one of the more unmentionable guilty pleasures of that decade with his misfired remake of Breathless (1983). While the film pretty much put the career of its star Richard Gere on hold for seven years, being the first of a line of unsuccessful turkeys that didn't get broken until 1990 with Pretty Woman and Internal Affairs, McBride walked away from that fiasco more or less unscathed. Moving back and forth between television and mainstream movies, he directed episodes for TV’s The Twilight Zone and The Wonder Years as well as the movies The Big Easy (1987) and Great Balls of Fire (1989). A rather respectable career, all things considered, although he has actually delivered more turkeys than caviar. And this dud, a television flick (released in Europe as a "real" film) that tried to put an interestingly new spin to the vampire myth but that failed miserably, is definitely not caviar. Questionable is who is more to blame: McBride or scriptwriter Richard Shapiro, the man whose first television success was the script for Sarah T.—Portrait of A Teenage Alcoholic (1975).

Blood Ties starts out promisingly enough, with good ol’ Bo Hopkins (sporting a wonderfully fake Amish beard) leading two guys who look like bouncers into the bedroom of a peacefully sleeping country couple, bloodlessly staking them to the bed, filling their mouths with dirt and then torching them. When their son Cody (Jason London) pops into the room screaming "Mom! Dad!", they shoot him in the gut with a crossbow, but let him get away. Cody hightails for Long Beach, and it is then that one gets the first real hint about how bad Blood Ties is going to be, as Brad Fiedel’s abysmal synthesizer music tones over the credit sequence. The movie wears the music and other tasteless aspects of 1980s television, like its wardrobe, on its sleeve like some big piece of snot, neatly castrating an already ball-less flick.

Once Cody gets to Long Beach, he looks up his mysterious Uncle, the man his parents had told him as a child that he should go to if something terrible ever happened, and eventually finds out that he and his parents are, in fact, vampires. Actually, it is this spin on the vampire legend is the most interesting aspect of the whole film. Shapiro & McBride present vampires as basically another Western European race of human beings, the "Carpathians." The descendants of Adam's legendary first wife Lilith—a story generally skipped in Sunday school, she is presented in this film as a sexually adventurous woman turned out of house and home due to her predilection for sitting on top—Carpathians are more or less the same as everybody else, other than that they're a bit stronger, live longer, have bigger dicks and occasionally suck blood. The last they seem to do the most happily during sex, when they give each other big hickeys.

Blood Ties straggles uninterestingly along after that, alternately focusing on the question of whether or not Cody will become like all the other juvenile delinquent, motorcycle-riding young vampires or not, whether or not reporter (and vampire) Harry (Harry Venton) and some City Prosecutor will work it out and become a couple, what to do when the vampire hunters that killed Cody’s parents turn up, who's sleeping with whom and so forth. Basically, imagine some nighttime soap opera featuring almost-human vampires, but instead of using a whole season to tell the tale, everything gets stuffed onto one and a half hours. Not surprising, seeing that Shapiro was both a writer and executive producer for that trashy nighttime soap Dynasty; Blood Ties merely rehashes much of what happened on that series, but with a new angle. And like some trashy television series, the film ends with more than one story line not fully resolved. Could it be that Blood Ties was originally conceived as a nighttime television series? Sure feels that way. In any event, while Blood Ties never did make it to syndication, it did obviously inspire an Aaron Spelling rip-off in 1996 called Kindred: The Embrace.

Blood Ties is a bloodless dud, and considering how much it has to do with (heterosexual) sex, it sure lacks testosterone. Don’t bother.

Coffy (USA, 1973)

(Spoilers, eventually.) Trailer. Per say, the history of black film is almost as old as that of American film in general. While the first example of what was to eventually become the genre of Western Films — Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903/full film) — generally gathers the most attention when it comes to early cinematic entertainment (as Philip Strick puts it in Movies of the Silent Years (ed. By Ann Lloyd, London, 1984), the film “has long been established as a primitive example of parallel storytelling”), another film Porter made that year gets less attention: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Porter’s version of the novel is the first American film to feature a black character, and the title character at that. But as groundbreaking as the film was in doing this, it does still have one small flaw that now detracts considerably from its historic position: Uncle Tom's Cabin is populated mostly by white actors in blackface, even if Uncle Tom himself (James B. Lowe) is Afro American.

As insulting as the then-common practice might seem now, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was at least a well-intended and (arguably) non-derogatory presentation of the African American, which is not the case of the shorts featuring "black" characters films that followed — titles such as Wooing and Wedding of a Coon (1905) and The Dancing Nig (1907) are typical of the time — or of D. W. Griffith’s legendary A Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith's film may indeed hold the honor of being the first true masterpiece of US American feature-length narrative film, but it is also an unbridled tirade of anti-black sentiment in which Black Americans are divided between (black-faced) loyal fetch-its or uppity renegades out to rape white virgins (with only the Klan there to save civilization).

Partially as a response to this, according to the book A Separate Cinema (John Kisch & Edward Mapp, 1992), towards the end of the 'teens a variety of film companies (some "black-owned, others white-controlled") began appearing up and down the East Coast which specialized in films intended for screening at "big-city ghetto movie houses of the North, at segregated theaters in the South, and, on occasion, at black churches, schools and social gatherings." Oscar Micheaux’s The Homesteader (1919) is commonly accepted as the first true Afro-American feature film, and it inaugurated a long and fertile period of "a separate cinema" that still remains largely ignored when the history of American Film is discussed. Theoretically, it could be argued that the day and age of the "separate cinema" is over with, for the modern Afro-American film (like those directed by Spike Lee, Bill Duke, the Hughes Brothers or even John Singleton, for example) now tends to enjoy and are even often aimed at mainstream acceptance (and, often, a mixed audience) and, furthermore, the Afro-American actor (Denzel Washington and [cringe] Halle Berry, for example) has finally been given (an almost) equal positioning (if still in lesser numbers) within the world of Hollywood.

But this was definitely not the case in the 60s when a moving film like One Potato, Two Potato (1964) could be still be rejected at a film festival on the grounds that it featured an interracial kiss (don’t forget, Obama aside, interracial marriage in the US was still illegal in 14 states up until 1967, until the Supreme Court decided otherwise). And although a talented man like Sidney Poitier could indeed make a solid and respectable career as Hollywood’s token Afro-American big name, the mainstream film industry was still enough of a white world that even an actress as beautiful and talented as Dorothy Dandridge couldn’t maintain a viable career (at the time of her "barbiturate poisoning" in 1965, she hadn't made a film since Moment of Danger (1960). When it came to mainstream releases, whether grindhouse or first-run, the films then were meant for light-skinned faces.

But then came the 1970s and a genre of films that got dubbed Blaxploitation, a term that the Oxford English Dictionary claims was first used in the June 12, 1972 issue of New York magazine and was derived from the older term "sexploitation" (the usage of which started in 1942). If you are reading this blog, than you probably don’t need to have the term explained, but just in case you are a stray Republican that has been too busy earning money to realize the changes in society around you — although I guess it’s hard to do since Nov 4^th — the term describes a whole slew of films of varying levels of quality that were released specifically for Black America and which tackled all the genres common to mainstream films (e.g., horror, crime, family, etc). Indeed, often they were virtually straight remakes of past or current successful Hollywood films with a black cast (Cool Breeze (1972/trailer, for example, was a remake of Asphalt Jungle (1950/trailer), and William Girdler’s Abby (1974/trailer) simply retooled The Exorcist (1973/trailer). But, unlike the "separate cinema" of yesterday, although a few were black directed, most were white-controlled.

The first Blaxploitation film to show up on the scene is generally accepted as Ossie Davis's entertaining Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970/trailer), while the first one to cross the racial boundaries to become a true mixed-audience hit was Gordon Parks Sr.'s Shaft (1971/trailer) — both are early classics of the genre, although neither carries the force and anger of the first truly undisputed masterpiece of modern, political black filmmaking Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971/trailer). Still, they are amongst the classic Blaxploitation films that every true fan of the genre (or of film history in general) should see at least once. Other classics of the genre also include (but are not limited to) Gordon Parks Jr.'s Super Fly (1972/trailer), William Crain's decidedly trashier movie Blacula (1971/trailer) — although his undervalued and forgotten Dr Black and Mr Hyde (1976/trailer) is actually more fun — and the film that this verbose blog entry is actually about: Jack Hill's exploitation masterpiece (among many), Coffy (1973).

Coffy is the product of white boy Jack Hill, who was a 40-year-old low-budget sleaze specialist by the time he got pulled in to write and direct Coffy, which is only one of many excellent films he put his fingers to. An undeservedly forgotten filmmaker, Hill pretty much dropped out of filmmaking by the end of the polyester decade to go New Age. But prior to his discovery of meditation, he directed an interesting array of exploitation films, the most notable being Spider Baby (1968/trailer), The Big Doll House (1971/trailer), The Big Bird Cage (1972/trailer), Foxy Brown (1973/trailer) and Switchblade Sisters (1975/trailer). A specialist in trash movies, even his worst films generally serve up a decent portion of everything slime-film lovers want: violence and juggernauts. But Coffy is in no way his worst film; in fact, alongside the strangeness that is Spider Baby, it is surely his best. Coffy is a groundbreaking and true Blacksploitation classic that, until the DVD revolution, one tended to read about more often than to see. But, once Tarentino rehabilitated the film’s director by claiming Jack Hill as one of his biggest influences, Coffy suddenly became rather easy to find. And that’s how it should be, for Coffy is some fine trash that definitely is worth renting. Sleaze? Sure it is — but top notch sleaze, to say the least.

A vigilante film, Coffy not only beat Death Wish (trailer) to the theaters by a full year, but it also almost makes Charles Bronson's legendary film seem like a television movie in comparison. Beautiful Pam "Love Puppies" Grier does a true star-making turn as the movie’s title character. Her eye-sizzling attributes of an Afro-American Venus, combined with a solid script that barrels along at full speed and Jack Hill’s equally competent direction, combine to make Coffy a Blaxploiation masterpiece that has to be seen to be believed. The original posters and newspaper adverts for Pam Grier's first lead role say Coffy is "the baddest one chick hit-squad that ever hit town," and she spends most of the film justifying the description, when she isn't baring her bodacious bobulars. Within the first ten minutes, we don't just get to see some teasing cleavage followed by delicious nipple peeking when she appears as (seemingly) a strung-out but hot-looking babe willing to spread her legs for a couple of sleazebags in exchange for a fix, but we're graphically treated to her blowing a drug dealer's head off with a double-barreled shotgun and then forcing a junkie to shoot up bad drugs. (An audacious introduction to a movie hero if there ever was one — she does all that before we even know the driving force behind her actions.)

(Now the full plot description, spoiler heavy.) A pretty innocuous sounding title song from jazz man Roy Ayers pops in for the credits, and then it's on with some prime sleaze, liberally peppered with pathos and more mammeries than normally seen in a non-porn film from the 70s. Coffy is an ER nurse out for some revenge after some tainted shit sent her 11-yearold sister catatonic. Between working, committing homicide and giving her wanna-be congressman boyfriend Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw) blowjobs, Coffy spends her time brooding whether her actions are morally justifiable or not, hanging out at the rehab clinic where her sister stares at the walls, or chilling with her childhood (ex) sweetheart Carter Brown (William Elliott). Carter is an honest cop who later unwittingly plants the seed in Coffy's head that the only real way to stop the drugs is not at the bottom with the pushers but at the top with drug lords. Carter gets a baseball bat to his head (and Coffy gets her love pillows manhandled) when he refuses to be bought by the Las Vegas mob moving into town, so Coffy's doesn't need est to get motivated or lose the last of her qualms. In a bikini and to the sound of someone singing "He's a pimp, he's a pusher" she hooks up with King George (Robert Do Qui, remembered by most people — if at all — as Sergeant Reed in the RoboCop films), becomes part of his stable of hot hussies and manages to switch all his heroin for sugar. One catfight later in which Grier manages to pull down the tops of every attacking hooker in the room she has a date with the woman-beating top man of the operation, and soon she is crawling across the floor gun in hand to blow away his balls. Unluckily for her, she gets stopped by his men, who recognize her from the night they fondled her boobs and made Carter a vegetable. Thinking King George set them up, they promptly take care of King George for Coffy and, after revealing to her that even her man Howard is on everything, take her out to be eliminated. After shooting her up with King George's "heroin," bad boy Omar (cult character actor Sid Haig) decides to bonk the babe in the dirt under an overpass and gets a sharpened hair pin through his jugular as a reward. Within twenty minutes, everyone but Coffy meets their maker, our avenging angle walking off into the sunrise to the sound of someone singing "It's not the end it's the beginning."

One of the first and the few Blaxploitation films that features a strong female main character, for all its exploitative elements — and there are a lot — the film still portrays Coffy as one strong, intelligent woman that knows how to get what she wants. And if some women decry how Coffy uses her curves and physical desirability to do so — and is thus just another male fantasy as a result — they simply fail to take into account that she uses the same weapons that such fantasy film figures as James Bond or Shaft use to get what they want: their natural sexual attractiveness. She is far less an easy lay than a powerful woman who knows just how idiotically one-track a man's mind is, and she merely uses the simplest of weapons to take advantage of their weakest spot. That her fabulous love pillows billow so much in the process simply adds "realism". (The realism might have been heightened — and a greater level of equality achieved — had a pickle shot or two been included in the film, but back then, like now, the general masses of the USA were deadly frightened by penises on film.) True, her natural, 100% non-silicon curves are displayed in this film to an extent that such beauty is seldom shown in a whitebread mainstream release, but hell, as a result it is only all the more easier to understand why the men in Coffy do dumb things when she jiggles in their direction... something that cannot be said of all the women that get wet and swoon in desire whenever Roger Moore (the James Bond of the time) merely glances at them.

Regrettably, in all truth, as strong as Coffy is throughout the film, the last scene in the movie undermines every woman-empowering aspect of her personality. Whereas her previous actions were driven by anger and desperation resulting from the drugs and violence around her, the last person she blows away she kills not out of moral rage but due to the anger of a spurred woman: while she almost caves in to Howard’s smooth justifications of his involvement in the mafia, when the half-naked white chick strolls out of his bedroom cooing his name, she blows him away out of simple jealousy.

Nonetheless, Coffy is a film that has to be seen. Do so, now. And now that we have Obama as our president, isn’t it about time Pam Grier got a star on Hollywood Boulevard?