Accion Mutante (1993, Spain)

A delightfully tasteless, violent piece of low-budget fun from Alex de la Iglesia, the Spanish specialist in black humor. The title Accion Mutante refers to a group of incompetent terrorists made up of freaks, cripples and mutants that, many years in the future, wage a war against beauty and perfection. Just how incompetent they are is made obvious in the opening scene in which a muscle-bound bodybuilder they mean to kidnap ends up being suffocated. Logically enough (?), in the next scene Ramon (Antonio Resines)—the group’s founder and leader—gets released from prison and is picked up at the prison gate by his (known) fellow terrorists. The time has come for The Big Plan to be put in action. Crashing a high society wedding, they shoot up a ton of people and kidnap the daughter (Frédérique Feder) of a multi-millionaire cookie baron, losing two Accion Mutante members along the way. Off they go by spaceship to Axturias, a barren planet where the ransom exchange is to take place; Axturias also lacks any women and is populated by completely crazy, horny miners. (Actually filmed on location in Los Monegros, Zaragoza, Spain, Planet Earth.) Unbeknownst to the rest of the group, Ramon plans to kill all his compatriots and keep the money for himself, but before he can finish knocking them all off—and after blowing off the head of one half of the Siamese twins—the spaceship crashes on the planet. Followed by the revenge driven, dead-weight-dragging surviving half of the twins, Ramon and his Stockholm Syndrome suffering hostage get captured by a family of obscenely fat, ugly men out to wet their willies.....
The big showdown is in a sleazy filthy bar full of gun-toting miners, a sensation-seeking television crew, a fanatically insane millionaire with a bomb, Ramon, his love sick hostage, the twin and a mess of trigger-happy policemen.
Filmed as a multi-violent farce, Accion Mutante has no socially redeeming features—which makes it all the more enjoyable. Considering its low budget, the film looks surprisingly good...the sets and the effects may be cheap, but they work, as does the film. The first full-length feature of director Alex de la Iglesia, this purveyer of bad taste went on two years later to make the equally entertaining oddity, Day of the Beast (1993), about a priest, a Rocker and a TV man out to kill the antichrist. In 1997 he was brought to Hollywood to direct the dark, cynically humorous but oddly disappointing exercise in studio-produced violence (and Rosie Perez vehicle) Perdita Durango, but his best films have all been homegrown Spanish productions. They have, on a whole, proven him to be an uncompromising, capable and creative director with a flair for hilariously tasteless violence.... definitely not for the masses, but damned enjoyable for those who like their stuff unadulterated. In this sense, Accion Mutante could possibly be the best of the lot.

De Jurk/The Dress (1996, Netherlands)

It must have something to do with the fact that soft drugs are legal in Holland that the country has such a number of surrealistic film makers. This film is definitely one of the more disturbing of its ilk, much more so than many other, much less depressing Dutch masterpieces of absurdity, such as director Alex van Warmerdam’s earlier film Noordlingen (1992) or Jos Stelling’s De Illussionist (1984).
De Jurk is about an unspectacular, ordinary house dress. Its existence, from the design of the material to its production to its end as the cremation dress of a bag lady, is a path of sadness and despair, of miseries and absurd situations gone astray. Within the first 15 minutes, the designer of the material is left by his girlfriend, the dress designer reveals himself as a pig fetishist and the manager of the production firm tries to kill his boss. Once bought, it brings nothing but misery to everyone who has anything to do with it. The first to wear it dies. The dress's subsequent owner, Johanna, a housemaid with a colorless, loveless life, barely survives two rape attempts. The next owner, a sheltered young girl living an equally morose life at home with a cold-hearted bitch mother, fairs little better. The tragic path of the dress seems circular, for its influence often befalls the same people as they slowly slide further down the path of tristesse. The manager's wife, now homeless, freezes to death while wearing it. Her husband, an equally lost soul, is reduced to having to pay for the simplest form of affection. The train conductor (played by the director himself), with his sexual fixation for the dress and anyone who wears it, likewise has his life destroyed by the last actions the mere image of the dress inspires him to commit.
De Jurk is a bizarre, cruelly funny film heavily tinged with an underlying sense of depression, featuring a world in which people have little understanding of and much less control over the destructive, alienating forces that influence their situations. Desire is felt by all but seldom satisfied, and when so, only in a debased form. Relationships are abused or simply stagnate in poisonous inertia, concern and compassion are drowned by an overall sense of rot and perversion. Hard to believe that such a distressing film can also be so funny.

Leviathan (1989, USA)

Here's a blast from the recent past, a film that filled sleaze-ball theatres for a few weeks way back in the late 80s and then quickly entered the nether regions of forgotten B-film hell. The few video junkies that ever refer to this movie generally dismiss it as a bad Alien (1979) rip-off, but it is actually much more a half-way decent rip-off of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), with the action transplanted from the Antarctica to some underwater mining station. One of many underwater action and horror films that flooded the cinemas at the time—the big budget example being The Abyss (1989), the cheapest being Deep Star Six (1989)—Leviathan is probably the most entertaining of the bunch, as it not only lacks both the inordinate running time and pretentiousness of James Cameron's turkey but also had enough of a budget to look a lot better than Deep Star Six. Of course, the movie's mildly gross out special effects were much more impressive thirteen years ago than they are today, but they still do their duty. The overall production design of the station itself, on the other hand, is still as impressive today as when the film first came out. (This cannot be said of much of the movie's unfunny sexist "humor," which in our repressively politically correct times would be classified simply as on-the-job sexual harassment and excised from any given current script.) All in all, alongside Tombstone (1993), Leviathan is among the best movies director George P. Cosmotos ever made—but then, keep in mind that Cosmotos' best known films include the laughable The Cassandra Crossing (1976), the unremittingly boring Of Unknown Origin (1983), the propagandistic Rambo II: First Blood (1985) and un-watchable Cobra (1986).
Amongst its many similarities to The Thing, Leviathan is heavy on familiar faces, the names of which are often hard to remember. This includes such stalwarts as Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Ernie Hudson, Meg Foster, Hector Elizondo and a pre-Home Alone Daniel Stern. Most of the actors fit their one-note characters perfectly, but Meg Foster—just starting her decline into B and Z films after her disastrous turn as Evil-Lyn in Masters of the Universe (1987)—deserves special mention for managing to do a worse acting job than the eternally wooden Peter Weller. One mostly forgotten name that brought a lot of guys into the theatres back in 1989 is Amanda Pays, an attractive, top-heavy babe with a fab accent who was a heartthrob and dick hardener for a brief time before falling off the face of the earth. At the time of its initial release, the biggest disappointment of the film for the more-hormonally raging viewers was that she kept both her bra and panties on for both her shower scenes, thus permitting no one to find out whether or not she was a natural brunette.
Leviathan takes place deep under the ocean at an underwater mining complex where the team is hard at work trying to meet their contract. With but a few days left before they are due to surface, the crew asshole (Daniel Stern) stumbles upon a scuttled Russian sub named Leviathan which, mysteriously enough, is listed on the international registry as still being on active duty somewhere in the Baltic Sea. A flask of vodka is found within the safe taken from the sub, and in no time both the asshole and the team's secondary set of tits (Lisa Eilbacher) have turned into a predatory fish-monster out for blood. A hurricane far above keeps the surviving crew members trapped below as one by one they become fish food. Just like the monster in The Thing, the fish-creature can regenerate itself from and contaminate others with but a single microscopic fleck of DNA and is thus virtually indestructible. And again, just like in The Thing, a well-meaning character destroys all means of escape for the good of humanity. Unlike in John Carpenter's modern classic, however, the creature in Leviathan will starve to death without plasma, so the survivors keep running around trying to blast the creature out into the deep sea where warm blooded mammals are rare. By the end of the movie, everyone dies whom you expect to die, and the viewer is left hoping that for the sake of humanity no dolphins or whales (both being mammals) should happen to swim by…
In truth, there is little new or exceptionally creative in this film, and any given B-film fan will recognize acts of plagiarism in everything from the music to the monster to characterization and plot turns, but for all its derivativeness, Leviathan is nonetheless a far more honest film than The Abyss and, likewise, a much more quick, painless and enjoyable ride. Go ahead, pop that brew, turn off your brain cells (if any are even on) and have fun.

Thin Air (1969, Great Britain)

(Spoiler alert—as if you should care.) A celluloid sleeping pill. Thin Air—originally titled Invasion of the Body Stealers, perhaps in the hope of being mistaken for the classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)—is terrible beyond description. Poor George Sanders. Although the headlining star, he is more of a secondary figure, and it hurts to see him walk through crap like this…. makes it almost hard to believe that it took another five years and six much better but still mostly crappy films before he killed himself. (In Barcelona, leaving a note that said: "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.") He must have realized the lack of quality in this piece of shit, for he doesn't even bother delivering a job half as good as he did two years earlier in the Sonny & Cher fiasco Good Times (1967).
Thin Air is talk, talk, talk, talk and absolutely no action, with a budget so low that the bones show worse than on an Ethiopian. Not surprising that the director never directed another film—in truth, one is hard pressed to say that he directed this one. The film is much too bad to even laugh at, but does almost become perversely entertaining due to the overall ineptitude of the production. It's the type of film where day-for-night shots look like day-for-day and a terrible event such as a death of a character is shown by a screaming close-up and a cut to falling binoculars, followed later by a scene of people sitting and saying "So-and-so is dead." Well, shiver me to the bones! Unbelievably enough, the script and story is actually credited to three people, but the film is so flat that it seems all three wrote dialogue and nobody remembered to add a plot.
Military parachutists are disappearing mid-jump, and after some dozen men disappear Bob (Patrick Allen) and Jim (Neil Connery) are called in by the military to investigate. Bob really has a way with the girls, despite being in his late 40s (if not older), ugly, out of shape and as charming as your local pervert. But then, the girls in this film, be they doctors, aliens or secretaries are all nothing more than willing boy toys, happy to screw any "real" man that happens to ask them to bend over. Bob talks and Jim talks and Dr. Julie (Hilary Dwyar) talks and every other minor character that pops up talks and then eventually Jim gets killed and Bob survives a sky dive and people figure out that there are aliens up there and even more people talk as all sorts of neon clues are overlooked while Bob runs after some ugly women named Lorna (Lorna Wilde) he screws each night on the beach. And Bob must be a good screw, for Lorna, who—Surprise!—turns out to be an alien, has discovered love and compassion from him, and, in the cellar to which all this non-action finally leads to, helps him destroy Dr. Mathews (Maurice Evans), the evil alien. She even returns the various men they had kidnapped to take home to help their dying planet survive. Huh?
Okay, Thin Air does occasionally feature some badly groovy music during the credits or whenever there is a short and unexciting chase scene, but that is about the only good thing it has going for it. And, though Lorna is one ugly cow—that and the fact that she so obviously lacks any talent might explain why she never had career—at least 'the sexy but intelligent' Dr. Julie doesn't look to bad. (Still, unlike in her role as Sarah in Witchfinder General (1968), Hilary Dwyar displays no noticeably acting talent either this time around.) The only other good thing to be said about Thin Air is that, well, it is less painful than constipation.