Revenge of the Living Dead Girls / La Revanche des mortes vivantes (France, 1987)

That this film continually gets bad word of mouth is beyond comprehension. Without a doubt, Revenge of the Living Dead Girls is one of the most amazingly disgusting, inane, exploitive, sleazy pieces of celluloid eurotrash ever made, a truly sick and enjoyable jaw-dropper that defies logic as it swerves from making you laugh to making you queasy. Were Georges Bataille alive today and to write a film script for a sleazy low budget zombie gore flick, he might have written something like this magnificent French monstrosity.

Former porno director Pierre B. Reinhardt — the man behind such high-class fare as Outrages transsexuels des petites filles violées et sodomisées / Outrageous Transsexual Girls Raped and Sodomized (1985) — takes no prisoners and shows no restraints in his visualization of what many claim to be the first French gore film, reflecting a world driven by materialistic and self-centered greed and abject moral turpitude. In its uncut form, there are few films as sleazy as this exploitation masterpiece, and even less that are so transgrerssive in terms of narrative and zombie conventions.
True, the film shares the odd pacing, bad dubbing and lack of logical that so many better known eurotrash favorites such as Zombie Lake (1981) or virtually anything by Jess Franco, but is it not these very distinctive characteristics that make eurotrash so enjoyably different from the norm? Search for an uncut version of this film and pop it in your DVD player — you might be disgusted, you might be amazed, you might even scratch your head in confusion, but you won't be disappointed. Seriously: a four-way lesbian scene featuring a naked hooker and three zombies? A zombie that bites off a man's wiener on a back road? A zombie shoving a sword deep into a woman's vagina? Zombies taking a midnight swim or wear highheals (and kill with them, too)? Zombies that drive and play organs? A screaming, pregnant woman's belly that dissolves so that her baby pops out while she showers? Revenge of the Living Dead Girls is one sick fucking film — and absolutely awe-inspiring, despite the occasional overly long expository passages.
Revenge of the Living Dead Girls opens with a hooker hitching a ride from a passing-by milk-tank truck. When they pull over to have sex in an ancient abandoned tower, a motorcyclist pulls up and pours something into the tank. Next we see a farm girl named Catherine, who is due to get married, sitting around in her kitchen with her mom decked out, like all farm girls about to get married, in straps and white see-through frillies. No sooner does she drink her milk than does she fall over dead. The motorcyclist stops for a drink at a bar where two young girls, Jocylin and Florence, are playing pinball; a drink of milk later they are lying dead on the floor. The motorcyclist freaks and splits to confront his contractor, whom he promptly bonks. To this comes another plotline of corrupt factory officials and the illegal dumping of chemicals — in the very cemetery where the three girls are buried. This seemingly brings the three dead girls back to life, and they wander off to do fun stuff like lesbian sex and murder almost everyone that has any connection to the factory. The plot of the film involves a lot of other confusing and illogical stuff, but the flabbergasting ending nicely ties up all the not-so-loose-after-all threads into a tidy if hilarious and wonderfully downbeat knot.
Revenge of the Living Dead Girls is pure solid gold trash, a gross and outlandish tale of sex, greed, gore, tits, revenge, death, big business, petty people and zombies that are actually more than what they seem to be. This film is much better than its undeserved bad reputation and definitely deserves rediscovery.

The Burrowers (USA, 2008)

(Trailer.) And how many Western Horror films can you think of?

When it comes to genre films, the Horror Western has long been a sorely ignored possibility, at least in regard to horrific events occurring in the Old West. The modern-day Midwest is hardly that ignored in this sense, the sun-burnt highways and badlands of the USA being a popular setting for any number of films narrating the fates of any number of people at odds with zombies, vampires, aliens, mutants, chainsaws, whatever. But when it comes to the unnatural underway in the Old West during or around the era of Manifest Destiny, the pickings are slim.
The two old "classic" William Beaudine guilty pleasures Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966) and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1966/full film at joost.com) promptly come to mind, as do a few entries from second-rate franchises losing steam, such as the snow-bound Ginger Snaps Back (2004/trailer), Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004/trailer) and the Mexican set From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter (2000/trailer), but original films — such as the interesting Grim Prairie Tales (1990/trailer), the kiddy film The Valley of Gwangi (1969/trailer), the regrettable failure Dead Birds (2004/trailer) or the almost traditional western High Plains Drifter (1973/trailer) — are rare, especially when considering the actual amount of celluloid filmed over the last 100 years.
For this reason alone J.T. Petty's latest film The Burrowers is a film worth watching, for it is indeed a horror tale occurring smack-dab in the midst of the Manifest Destiny, sometime in the 1800s in the sparsely populated and still largely unexplored Dakota territories. Regrettably, like most of the films previously mentioned, Petty's film is not entirely successful, but for all its flaws it not only reveals a strong cinematic eye but is never boring and continually retains the interest of the viewer. In fact, its only true flaw is that it seems under-developed and ends too abruptly, as if the entire sections were left out and the final scenes rushed so as to make the movie fit within a commercially viable 96-minute timeframe.
OK, the film also suffers a slight dearth of likeable characters — even the nicer ones show some truly disgusting sides on occasion (one of the worst being the teenage youth who decides to kiss his first female by kissing a "corpse") — but the lack of redeemable characters is less of a flaw than a reflection of reality in general. The film reflects the difficulties, dangers and unpredictabilities of the times, and as such The Burrowers isn’t about heroic types like Shane (1953) or the Pale Rider (1985/trailer) who saves the day, but is about Normal Joes confronted first by the hardships of the West and then by something truly unknown.
The lack of the clearly heroic type has put off some viewers who decry J.T. Petty's overtly liberal revisionism in regard to the Western itself, but even if he does overdue the evil Whiteman a bit, his revisionism is probably much closer to the truth than the golden sunsets populated with The Good in White and The Bad in Black as found in the traditional Western or popularized in the "true" tales of any number of admired western heroes. Face it, those were hard times during which a Redskin was considered as human as, well, a Taliban nowadays, and there wasn't much room left for wimps or moralists. Still, if you are even mildly of the John Birch Society type, you might want to skip this film (and, please, feel free to stop reading this blog).
Mostly low on blood but high on tension, laced with realistic characters and a general depressing tone, The Burrowers follows five men that take up the trail of what they assume to be a raiding Indian party that decimated the local settlement, taking six in tow. Among the missing six is MaryAnne (Jocelin Donahue), the flame of the Irish immigrant Coffey (Karl Geary), who strikes up a friendship with Walnut Callaghan (Sean Patrick Thomas), the ex-slave cook of the group of soldiers who have joined up in the search, led by the sadistic and Indian-hating Henry Victor (Doug Hutchison). The travels across the beautiful scenery of the Midwest quickly devolves from a search party to an Indian-torture party, which eventually results in the two groups parting ways as the original search party seeks what they assume to be another Indian tribe called “The Burrowers” by the other Native Americans... by the time they find out the truth, their numbers have been substantially reduced and hope seems gone as well. Can the Ute Tribe be of help? They are known to have successfully fought the creatures in the past....
In general, The Burrowers is low on gratuitous gore but nonetheless manages to have a high “ick” factor, achieved primarily through the acts of man. As a crossbreed of horror and western, The Burrowers treads closer to the western than it does the average monster flick. The horrors that the humans do are very much as terrible as that of the monsters, only the monsters are driven by an animalistic urge for nourishment whereas the humans, as "thinking" creatures, have no real excuse for their monstrous deeds. (Indeed, the Burrowers themselves only now feed on man because White Man has driven their traditional food of choice, the buffalo, to virtual extinction.) Less scary than simply suspenseful, eerie and unnerving, The Burrowers is a well-filmed and well-acted film with an underdeveloped storyline that is well worth watching despite its rushed and unsatisfying (and depressing) ending.
PS: The image below was found on Fear.net, where an anonymous poster has labeled J.T. Petty a "thief." Sure would be interesting to read the Spanish-language pulp....

Flesh Eating Mothers (USA, 1988)

(Trailer.) Rest assured, the movie is not a zombie Blaxploitation flick. No, this super-low-budget 1988 anti-sex flesh-eating mutant film is much more a cannibalistic version of Desperate Housewives, the big difference being that all the housewives actually look like frumpy, unattractive suburban mothers with bad haircuts and unattractive clothes and not like fuckable semi-anorexic Hollywood starlets with Brazilian waxes, tit jobs and a wardrobe bought on Rodeo Drive.

Flesh Eating Mothers, the directorial debut of James Aviles Martin, was preceded by one writing credit (for I Was A Teenage Zombie [1987/trailer]) and followed in 2003 with Artwatch, a film about the shortcomings of art restoration (!). According to the press release to Martin's still unreleased Latino drama ¡DIEGA! (2007), Flesh Eating Mothers was directed while the "auteur" was still in film school. And although the movie does indeed play like a student film, it does have its special geeky charms that help make it enjoyable on a certain level, particularly if you don't have any high expectations in the first place. Starring absolutely no one you have ever heard of or ever will hear of — most of those involved unsurprisingly have no other film credit to their name — the acting is as stiff as the direction is static, but the resulting unintentional laughs meld well with the intentional ones to coalesce into a relatively painless, mildly entertaining and funny atrocity. Much like The Boneyard (1991) or Blood Diner (1987), Flesh Eating Mothers is enjoyable despite itself…
(Spoilers — as if it matters any.) The film opens with a rather funny scene of a hunter running through the woods who, in no short order, first discovers that he’s missing an arm and then shoots a woman. Fast forward a few years, and the said hunter is now nothing less than Commissioner Dixon (Ken Eaton), the asshole who heads the police force is Suburbia, Somewhere, USA. Roddy Douglas (Louis Homyak), a particularly hairy Suburban husband lothario is bed-hopping between the frumpy, bored and unsatisfied housewives of the town, spreading a sexually transmitted virus that leaves the host male unaffected but mutates women who have had children into voraciously hungry cannibals. Officer McDormick (Mickey Ross) walks in on his alcoholic ex-wife Lois (Marie Michaels) eating their son Billy (Scott Lerner), and when she goes after McDormick he shoots her through the forehead. Everyone on the force, however, thinks he simply went postal — an assumption that Dixon facilitates by stealing important evidence. The town’s midget coroner knows the truth, but before he can do anything Dixon has Officer Hitchcock (Morty Kleidermacher) kill McDormick; Dixon also sets Hitchcock onto the coroner, but before Hitchcock can complete the job he gets eaten. Meantime, the various kids that have seen their mothers eat their brothers or dads gather together to calmly complain about their mothers' extreme PMS problems. The good coroner teams up with Felicia Dodd (Carolyn Gratsch), the tall, hot and blonde assistant of the town doctor (who only treats syph and gonorrhoea, it seems) to try to come up with a solution, and she actually does so. The kids run after their given mothers, injecting them with the slow-acting cure. Before it can take effect, the still-hungry moms corner Dixon in an alley, an event that the coroner takes advantage of the force Dixon into revealing the truth about why he framed McDormick and wants to cover everything up: he himself is a carrier. The mothers change back to normal and Dixon goes to jail, while somewhere across town Roddy Douglas gets his nose chomped off by the housewife he just bonked…
The cheesy dialog is rather funny at times — the scene in which two mutated mothers talk housewife shop as they search for food is a gas, for example — as is some of the third-rate acting. But in all truth, the script is incredibly sloppy and the director often doesn’t really seem to know what to do with his characters. Likewise, the film does feel a bit too long towards its rather dully executed finale. Still, Flesh Eating Mothers is so thoroughly idiotic and ridiculous that any fan of intellectually empty filmic trash will probably enjoy the movie, despite its slightly moral stance of extramarital sex = death. The occasional bursts of blood and gore act as a nice added attraction, and luckily James Aviles Martin never has any of the mothers do a nude scene — now that would truly have been horrific.
The film also has a rather nice song entitled Suburbia to its opening credits sequence, which is available on the compilation Rollercoaster of Death 2: The Final Sacrifice at The Manchester Morgue. It is sung by one "Sherri Lamar" who, under her real name Sherri Ehrlich released a children’s CD in 2000 entitled Around the World in Song, which can be found on Amazon.

To the Limit (USA, 1995)

Bad films usually improve — that is, become more entertaining — with age. Despite all the years since To the Limit was made, however, the film still needs to age awhile longer — say, around thirty to ninety years, if not an eternity. This movie, a sequel of sorts to director Raymond Martino's equally inept Da Vinci's War (1993), is a true celluloid fuck-up, a turd so abysmal that the few laughs instigated by its unprofessional incompetence end up being choked by the embarrassment the viewer feels both for the people involved and for watching it. The only things in To the Limit that are worse than the plot are the direction, lighting, music, editing and acting. Need an explosion or have someone shot off the Hoover Dam? Well, make a loud "Bang!" and edit to after the fact, to the person dead or the survivors looking down over the side. Continuity in this film, whether in terms of the editing or in the story development, is non-existent — much like any form of tension or suspense. Was there actually even a complete script when the film began, or was it ad-libbed throughout?

Had Raymond Martino, the director, jettisoned the plot, the male actors and virtually everything but for the occasional bulbous, silicon-filled love-pillows of the various females, the movie would've have been much better, if not at least mercifully shorter. In truth, while there are some tit shots and flesh, there is hardly enough to make the film worth watching, with or without Anna Nicole Smith, the infamous (and dead) 1993 Playboy Playmate of the Year, as the character Collette. Although she always did look good in beat-sheets or when seen briefly and dressed as a stereotype, as in The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994 / trailer) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994 / trailer), when naked in To the Limit there is not only a full lack of grace in her out-of-balance movements, but her breasts reveal a slightly unnatural form that infers good skin but excess stuffing at work. (Not like she looked bad with her original, all-natural stuffing seen below, especially when compared to the one further below of her in the film having an orgasm while bathing).

OK, true, when she was alive and in form, and not zonked out on drugs or talking, there probably wasn't a jug-loving heterosexual man alive that would have said no to the chance of sliding his stiff weenie between her pair when oiled, but in To the Limit Smith is so bad an actress that one is left wishing they could simply say "Shut up and swallow." She does a good job at proving that Mamie van Doreen was indeed a talented actress, but then, Mamie never had to pretend that every shower or bath she took naked gave her an orgasm. (Smith really should have stopped trying to act and simply given the viewer a decent beaver shot.)

The protracted, confusing plot concerns some nasty bald guy with a beard and tattoos who smokes opium and likes to have hot wax dripped on his back when he wants to shoot a load. That he is ex-CIA we know because not only does he sit in front of a cheap, second-hand computer in most scenes, but everyone says it again and again. He's after some diskette full of all sorts of nefarious information, and wipes out Colette's husband China Smith (Michael Nouri) and most of Frank Da Vinci's family and friends at his wedding. Frank, played by John Travolta's gray-bearded, shorter and talentless brother Joey, spends the rest of the film in Vegas with his mob friends, playing an indecisive Hamlet and dodging various half-assed hit attempts before he teams up with Colette and bonks her good. Is it true love, or does Colette also have some dark, evil plan of her own? Who the fuck cares?

How bad is the film? Joey Travolta is actually the best and most convincing actor in the whole production, but for the couple strippers at the bachelor's party scene — that should give you an idea.

To the Limit comes across like some excessively long, unfunny and surreal R-rated Saturday Night Live skit from hell, puffed up from 1½ minutes to 1½ hours. The film is to be avoided at all costs, even for jug-lovers. If you want tits, get a decent porn film instead, as it is sure to have at least the same quality in tits but much better production values, direction, editing, lighting, acting, music, continuity and plot than this turkey.