The Atomic Café (USA, 1982)

(Directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader & Pierce Rafferty.) A truly great, hilarious, sickening, unbelievable, tragic film. Using material culled from military training films, newsreels, governmental propaganda movies and educational school films, the directors have strung together a cynical and damning indictment of both the U.S. Government’s unforgivable abuse of the world’s trust and the American public’s "Love the Bomb" attitude during the Cold War. The Atomic Cafe alternately sends chills of disbelief up your spine or leaves you laughing (even as you feel sick) in horror. Propagating such inane advice as "duck and cover," the film clips selected are so revoltingly facetious that one finds it hard to believe that anyone ever took them seriously. This film is much more a horror film than any Hollywood special effects extravaganza ever could be, especially since so many of the names, faces and places are real, such as the Bikini Islands, the Rosenbergs or Lloyd Benson and Richard Nixon, and because the passage of time has revealed so much of what is shown and said to be flat-out lies. Aside from the initial scenes of Japanese victims of the bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the horror is less based on the visually repulsive than the simple un-believability of it all. This is your land, those are your parents and grandparents, that is your government—and you still believe what they say about genetically altered foodstuffs and hormones in your meat? (Oh, yeah, and don’t forget: Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was responsible for the Twin Towers.) If the film seems a bit long at times, it has less to do with an excess of scenes than it does with the deadening of the nerves and senses the over abundance of stupidity displayed causes. Could it be we are just as easily duped about things nowadays as the generations before? (A rhetorical question at best.)

Great soundtrack, too.

Dracula vs. Frankenstein (USA, 1970)

(Trailer.) Not the Spanish Paul Naschy vehicle from 1970 (Los Monsruos del terror (trailer), also a legendary turkey), but the infamous Al Adamson flick of a year later.
Al Adamson is one the unsung heir-apparent of Ed Wood, Jr., but his career differed Wood's in an important way: Adamson actually had a successful career as a surreally incompetent exploitation filmmaker. Seemingly, he even actually eked out a satisfactory living from his regular output of inept but oft-entertaining films, for unlike Ed Wood, who was living in poverty as an unknown and forgotten drunken failure when he died in 1978 of what was most likely heart failure, when Adamson was murdered in 1995 (and hidden under the freshly laid cement and tile of his new bathroom) by a live-contractor named Fred Fulford (currently serving 25 years to life), Adamson was living a relatively comfortable life as a grindhouse filmmaker for Independent-International Pictures, a production firm he co-founded with Sam Sherman in 1969.
At their worst-best, Adamson’s films are as “entertaining” as Wood's surrealistically inept masterpieces, but Adamson's films often display a sadistic and vicious attitude that Wood's innocent output never came close to. Like Wood, however, Al Adamson had an affinity for washed-up stars from the past. Dracula vs. Frankenstein even features two such saddened shells of Universal's Golden Age of Horror in their last screen appearances: an emphysema-wracked and half-blind J. Carrol Naish as Dr. Duryea, the film’s mad-scientist, and an obviously alcohol-addled Lon Chaney Jr. as Groton, Dr. Duryea’s mentally challenged ax-wielding helping hand (a character Adamson almost mockingly presents as a homicidal version of Lennie from Of Mice and Men (1939), one of Chaney's few truly critically acclaimed film characterizations from his pre-alcoholic days).
Dracula vs. Frankenstein was supposedly originally started as a sequel to one of his earlier films, the sleazy and nihilistic biker flick Satan's Sadists (1969/trailer), but evolved underway into the nonsensical horror film that now exists. This would explain why the biker Rico (the at the time has-been child star Russ Tamblyn) and his biker cohorts flit in and out of the film before finally being axed by Groton.
The inane and convoluted non-plot of Dracula vs. Frankenstein finds Dr. Duryea, the wheelchair-bound last living descendant of Dr. Frankenstein, working out of the funhouse of a beachside amusement park, busy creating some sort of serum from the blood of women that died under the duress of great fear. Their fear, it seems, "energizes the molecular structure of their blood," an event essential to his serum that does something. Into the setup pops Count Dracula (Zandor Vorkov, a.k.a. stockbroker Roger Engel, commonly cited as the worst Dracula ever), who has dug up the buried remains of the original Frankenstein monster. Dracula gets Duryea to revive the monster and, in exchange for the serum that does something, Dracula and the monster kill Dr. Beaumont (Forrest J. Ackerman), a hated adversary of Duryea. Somewhere along the way Judith Fontaine, a third-rate Las Vegas entertainer (played by the legendary Regina Carrol, Adamson’s extremely un-photogenic wife and a real-life, former third-rate Las Vegas lounge entertainer) enters the scene, in search of her lost sister Jodie (Maria Leese, whose career had peeked two years earlier when she played a lead in Lee Frost's legendary Love Camp 7). Since Jodie was last seen hanging around with the local hippies close to the amusement park, Judith starts flashing the girls picture around and, as a pay-off, gets slipped some LSD at a local hippie hangout. (Undoubtedly the most laughable freak-out scene ever filmed.) Saved by nice-guy hippies Samantha (Anne Morrell) and Strange (Greydon Clark, the future director of such memorable classics as Black Shampoo (1976/trailer), Satan's Cheerleaders (1977/trailer) and Lambada, the Forbidden Dance (1990/trailer)), Judith wakes up in the pad of Mike Howard (Anthony Eisley), an aging hippie who decides to assist her in her search for Jodie. More girls go missing and more young men show up dead, and the trail of clues Mike and Judith follow all lead back to the Creature Emporium, Duryea's house of illusions. When the two break into the building and discover all the missing and undead (?) girls a fight ensues in which Duryea, Groton and the obnoxious midget barker (Angelo Rossitto, recognizable from Freaks (1932) and an untold number of other films) get killed. Dracula escapes with the monster and Judith in tow, but Mike follows them and frees his new main squeeze, but as they run away Dracula zaps Mike with his magic ring and fries him to crisp. Dragging Judith to an old abandoned church, Dracula is about to make Judith his new vampire bride when Frankenstein gets the hots for her, too. The two monsters battle it out, but after Dracula wins by pulling off the monsters arms and head, he fails to make it back to the church before sunrise and burns away on the church steps. Judith then manages to undo her binds and walks away into the new day...
The plot as explained might seem linear enough, but then, numerous non-sequential and unnecessary scenes have been left out of it for sake of brevity. In general, the above description fails to mirror the true ridiculousness of the chain of events and the overall incompetence with which it is presented and played. Dracula vs. Frankenstein never achieves the same sleazy exploitive heights of such Adamson products as Satan’s Sadists or The Female Bunch (1969/trailer), but it still fully lives up to its reputation as a pinnacle of shoddy filmic inanity, a piece of grindhouse filmmaking so schlocky and ridiculous that it defies logic and description. In truth, at around 90 minutes running time, the film is a tad too long; likewise, the released ending as described above is far less entertainingly funny than the alternative (shorter and unused) happy ending also available as an extra on the DVD. Nonetheless, in whatever form viewed, the film is sure to satisfy any true lover of cheap and ludicrous exploitation cinema sludge. Anyone else will probably feel as if they have had their eyes and brains raped.

Unforgettable (USA, 1996)

Unforgettable (trailer) is an odd mixture of science fiction and thriller that veers between keeping the viewer interested and putting him to sleep and, in the end, is an unsatisfying and derivative concoction obviously taken much too seriously by everyone involved. The effects and the stunts may be completely up-to-date, but the story is weak 1930's B-movie—the only thing missing is John Carradine or Bela Lugosi hamming it up.
Director John Dahl is capable of making watchable films, as has been evidenced by such fine and diverse films as the teenagers-endangered-by-a- psycho-road film Joy Ride (2001/trailer), the black comedy You Kill Me (2007/trailer) and the modern film noir (and unjustifiably unknown) Red Rock West (1992/trailer). Dahl's follow up to Red Rock West, The Last Seduction (1994/trailer), may have gotten the most attention of all his films to date, but that film's script has almost as many flaws as the script of Unforgettable, and is primarily watchable due to Linda Fiorentino's excellent turn as a cold-hearted manipulative and evil bitch (who wins). Fiorentino also stars in Unforgettable, but this time she plays a rather unassuming, mousy character, Dr. Martha Briggs. Briggs is experimenting on rats with a serum that, when mixed with spinal fluids and injected, transfers the memories of the first rat into the one injected.
Unforgettable tells the tall tale of Dr. David Krane (a beginning-to-bloat Ray Liotta), a medical examiner for the Seattle Police Department who is believed by everyone to be the murderer of his wife. Freed on a technicality, he himself was too drunk the night of the murder to know for sure that he didn't actually do it. Hearing about Dr. Briggs' experiments, Krane is hot to do the drug using the spinal fluids of long dead wife (a vial of which just happens to be in storage at the medical examiner's storage room at the police station). Stealing some of the experimental drug from Martha's university office, in no time flat he has shot himself up not only with the fluids of his wife, but with those of a pretty, young art student killed in a drugstore massacre and the fluids of a brain-dead supposed would-be suicide as well. All the while Martha follows him around lecturing him on how bad it is for his heart and explaining anything that might possibly not be understood by the viewer.
Like any good over-the-top mad scientist film, Unforgettable features everything and more, including exploding labs, chase scenes, a shootout at in a church baptism, a woman taped to a chair in a burning room, a mass killing in a drugstore, adultery, alcoholism and broken marriages. On top of that, whenever the story gets a little dull or Dahl decides that (for whatever reason) a shock is needed, Briggs has an unexpected flashback or hallucination. Why he has hallucinations when the serum should only transfer memories is unexplained, but logic is never a strong point of this type of cheesy flicks.
Of course, the true murderer is revealed by the movie's end and there is a big punch-out fight in a burning house before the big explosion, but somehow little in this film actually ignites. Dahl once again uses a slow, steady style of filmmaking that functions well with intelligently convoluted and complicated stories of the more traditional film noir vein—like in Red Rock West or Kill Me Again (1989)—but in this weird, hybrid turkey it merely seems plodding.
Not surprisingly, Bill Geddie's script was liberally plagiarized by fellow scriptwriter Tom Swale the following year for a substandard television movie Murder in My Mind (1997). Starring television perennials Nicolette Sheridan and Stacy Keach, the latter film at least served to make Dahl's movie seem better, if only by comparison.

Demagogue (UK, 1997)

(A version of this review appeared in a print copy of the excellent film magazine Shock Cinema some half-dozen years ago. If you don’t know the magazine, you should. For more info on Shock Cinema, check out their homepage).

A wonderfully entertaining, fully tasteless, over-the-top and bloody farce that (due to budget limitations) never reaches the excesses of vintage Peter Jackson, but never the less does its best at trying. The story is consistently inane, with regular fountains of blood gushing everywhere, everything being in such excess that one can’t help but laugh—even if the English accents sported by more than one actor occasionally makes the verbal jokes and word games impossible to understand. Within the first five minutes of the Demagogue, one knows that what lies ahead is going to be a full scale barrage of tasteless, laughable multi-violence as one is promptly served a gross out scene of a blood spurting cesarean section birth of the mutant baby performed with a butcher knife. The baby is the result of genetic experimentation by a cult out to contact other worlds, who hope to use the mutant’s super intelligence for intergalactic communication. DJ and private detective Jason Bason, hired by two obnoxious old farts, infiltrates the cult in order to locate and save the couple’s beautiful daughter, who Jason falls in love with. The leader of the cult, Belladonna Kalashnikov, has the hots for Jason, and, much to the aggravation of her blood-thirsty, kill-happy psycho right-hand man, brings him into their secret compound to be their DJ. Meanwhile, the Doctor in charge of the genetic experimentation, in order to pay off some debts, reveals the value and location of the baby to a family of dreadlocked, ruthless and incompetent Italian gangsters. They choose to break into the compound at the same time as a group of military fighters, and they all get mistaken as invaders from Mars by the cult’s head of security, who has rigged the entire front garden of the compound with hidden weapons. And deep in the bowels of the compound, Jason, unmasked as a detective and tied to the girl he loves, hangs from the ceiling as all mutant-mistakes from past genetic experimentation break free from their prison cell....

Demagogue wears its supposed (according to IMDB) $4,800 budget on its sleeve, but the obviousness of its lowly birth makes it all the more enjoyable. A ballistic ballet of blood and guts spurting from and onto faces and other body parts, nothing is sacred in Adam Trotman & Thmas Lawes’ ridiculously over the top approach to mixing inane science fiction with inept crime and multi-violent action. Heads get knocked off with baseball bats, legs get blown off by bullets, heads get split with hand shovels, bodies get blown up by flying missiles, hippie cultists get cannibalized by mutants, dads get spikes through their foreheads—Demagogue is a true gore hounds feast (providing the gore hound has a humor): a creative, individualistic low budget piece of unapologetic trash in which everyone not just dies, but dies gushing like a fountain. The only thing that is a greater shame than that Trotman & Lawes never made another feature length film after this one is that this one is so hard to find. It seems never to have even made it to DVD.