Here is a legendary film that for years everyone had heard of but few people ever had the chance to see. Needless to say, Youtube.com has changed that. But once upon a time, this film was mentioned in reverie by folks that refused to actually tell what happens in the film — other than that, well, Bambi meets Godzilla. But then, with a running length of roughly 1.5 minutes, there really isn’t all that much to tell, other than it is a fun classic that everyone should see at least once in their life. Bambi Meets Godzilla is all setup for a final punch line, and as such remains one of the shortest and funniest films ever made.Often misappropriately called Bambi vs. Godzilla, the film was made in 1969 by Marv Newland, a student at the Art Center of Design in Pasadena. (And not in L.A., OK folks?). Supposedly the first film to come out of Art Center, the Marv's film was a quick solution for a term project when he realized that his initially intended film, a live action film, wouldn't be finished on time. According to popular legend, at the time he made Bambi Meets Godzilla he was living in an apartment rented from Adriana Caselotti, who had supplied the voice to Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937/trailer). Seeing that she was active in real estate, the legend could well be true — and could well also explain why Marv was inspired to use a Disney icon in his film. (Why he chose Bambi rather than Snow White is easy to surmise: Bambi is a lot easier to draw than Snow White.)Supposedly it took him a full two weeks to complete the film, but considering the simplicity of the animation and shortness of the film, he probably worked on the film between distractions — as everyone tends to do in art school, as anyone who went to an art school can tell you. In any event, he managed to make a classic "underground" short, which is a lot more than many an other filmmaker has ever managed to do. His film is, of course, an homage to two favorites of childhood: Walt Disney's Bambi (1942/trailer) and Ishirô Honda's allegory of the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Gojira (1954/trailer), a film better known to most English speakers in its re-edited version starring a closeted Raymond Burr, Godzilla (1956/trailer). If the music and sound effects sound familiar, it's because the pleasant classical music is the highly familiar overture from Gioacchino Rossini’s opera William Tell, while the sound to the climactic confrontation is the final reverberating note of The Beatles' A Day in the Life.Following the world premiere of Bambi Meets Godzilla at Art Center and Marv's eventual graduation, Marv went into television commercials before leaving La La Land for Canada in 1970. Eventually settling in Vancouver, he founded the animation film company International Rocket Ship in 1975, which oddly enough does not seem to have an internet presence. Among the most renowned projects that he worked on in the years since Bambi Meets Godzilla are the two Gary Larson TV animated films, Tales from the Far Side (1994) and Tales from the Far Side II (1997), two under-appreciated masterpieces of animated humor. (Click here for roughly the first ten minutes of the first film.) In general, however, Marve seems to keep a low profile. Like so many a successful film, Bambi Meets Godzilla has since been followed by a sequel entitled Son of Bambi Meets Godzilla (1999). The film, written and directed by Eric Fernandes, was made without the involvement of either Marv Newland or Walt Disney (or Ishirô Honda, for that matter), which sorely shows. A mere few seconds longer than the film its follows, its computer animation might be a primitive as Marv's original line drawings but it lacks the freshness and fun of the first film. Enjoy this early classic of no-budget filmmaking.
Needless to say, as in the case of most sequels and prequels, it is arguable that a film like this one isn't really needed and adds little new to the overall story. That said, From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter is a nifty piece of trash filmmaking that, while never surpassing the original, still entertains in its own way. Had the original never been made, this film would have been a minor if but pleasant alternative. True, aside from its obvious bigger budget, part one is definitely the superior film, being much crazier, more extreme, more cynical and simply better made, acted and directed than The Hangman's Daughter, but this pre-quel has enough spark and juice to stand on its own as good, entertaining trash. Shot in South Africa, The Hangman's Daughter supposedly had a budget of $10 million dollars, half of that of the original, but some sources say that the $10 Million was actually the budget of both Part 2 (The Hangman's Daughter) and 3 (Texas Blood Money [1999/trailer]) together – which is easy to believe at times, especially with the CGI. The story takes place in Mexico around 1913, some 80+ years before that of From Dusk Till Dawn (1996/trailer) and ostensibly narrates how Santanico Pandemonium, originally played by Salma Hayek, comes to be the queen of the vampires. The actual origin of the vampires in general is never explained, but Santanico seems to have been product of a vampire-human mating, though the how and when the human dad and the vamp mom did the down and dirty is not gone into in any detail. The story structure is 100% the same as From Dusk Till Dawn in that the first half of the film narrates how a variety of anti-heroes and hanger-ons end up at the Titty Twister (in this case called "La Tetilla Del Diablo" – or, translated, The Devil's Nipple) while the second half is a gore-fest of vampires feasting and desperate fighting. But now, before all the fangs get bared and the guts start spilling, instead of white trash terrorizing RV tourists in America, we have a violent, over-the-top spaghetti western. (In fact, one idea – that of the hanging rope being shot apart just as a man is hanged – is lifted directly from the classic Leone/Eastwood western The Good, The Bad and the Ugly [1966/trailer]. On the other hand, another idea, that of blades that pop out from the tip of boots, is taken from From Russia with Love [1963/trailer].) Director P.J. Pesce probably got the job because of his previous film, the similarly direct to video western The Desperate Trail (1994), which also has its own moments of fun excess. The tale of The Hangman's Daughter is structured loosely around the actual disappearance of the famed American caustic wit, writer and alcoholic Ambrose Bierce, who, as any decent student of American literature knows, disappeared into the sunset of Mexico and supposition when he road off to join the revolutionary forces of Pancho Villa. (Whether or not he ever made it is not revealed in the final, released version of this film, but in the first cut of The Hangman's Daughter he was revealed as having become a vampire.) Bierce is well-played by Michael Parks, a regularly employed but forgotten great white hope of the 1960s who started his career with a splash imitating James Dean in the trash-classic The Idol (1966) before his career eventually devolved into stuff like The Private Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1977). (Now he is another definition of what one calls a "cult actor.") Passing through a tiny fart of a town, he witnesses how the hanging of Johnny Madrid (Marco Leonardi) gets foiled through the assistance of Catherine Reese (Jordana Spiro) and how Madrid and Esmeralda (Ara Celi), the titular hangman's daughter, ride away through a rain of bullets. Later, the stagecoach he is sharing with the bible-thumpers Mary (pre-crack Rebecca Gayheart) and John Newlie (Lennie Loftin) gets robbed by Madrid and his men. Through a variety of contrivances, the three stranded passengers end up at La Tetilla Del Diablo, followed soon after first by Madrid, Esmeralda and company and then by the Hangman (Temuera Morrison) and his men (with Reese in tow) as well as an assortment of others stragglers. (Including the mandatory African American, Orlando Jones as Ezra Traylor, a fuller brush man.) As in all three films, Razor Charlie (Danny Trejo) is the bartender, but this time we also have Sonia Braga as Quixtla along for the ride. The vampire mother to the human hangman father, Braga is both excellently cast and one damned sexy 50 year old – in fact, until she turns all monster like, she actually looks to be one damned fuckable old lady and displays all the dangerous sexuality and magnetism that Hayak had in the original and Ara Celi lacks in this one. The blood of a barroom brawl is the trigger for the vampires to cut loose, and the rest of The Hangman's Daughter features the disparate survivors fighting to survive and dying off one by one before the last survivors ride off, leaving the converted Esmeralda as the new queen of the vampires. The film's last shot is a virtual exact copy of that of the original From Dusk Till Dawn, showing the ruin of the Aztec (Incan? Mayan? Olmec?) temple descending down from the back of the bar. In general, the character's are not that likable, but they do at least have individual personalities. The violence is high but not as hilariously over the top as in the first film, though the scene in which a vampire gets his testicles kicked out does reach a new high point in tasteless ideas. All in all, The Hangman's Daughter is a fine B film full of irredeemable violence and gore that holds up well either as a sequel/prequel or simply as a film in its own right. It deserves more than the ignominious realm of straight to video and forgotten films that it has been relegated to.
Raiders of the Damned, from 2005, is (unsurprisingly enough) the only film of director Milko Davis, a director that was probably so busy searching for his anus while on set that he forgot he was making a film…. The result is a film that has a great and promising (if derivative) title that promises a lot but that is also a film in search of a coherent plot or story, populated by actors in search of talent. But to put all the blame of Davis is perhaps unfair, for as inept as his directorial skills seem to be, he did not toss together the supposed film script. If there really was one – the film comes across more like a half-dozen half-baked ideas tossed together in some semblance of order – then the writer Mike Ezell must carry some of the blame for this incoherent mess. Raiders of the Damned is indeed one of those rare films that gives bad films a bad name – at the moment. Truth be told, the film simply hasn’t aged enough. In another 15 years, when it looks as vintage as it does incompetent, this film could easily become an example of classically bad film, along the lines of Robot Monster (1953/trailer) or Santa Claus Conquers Mars (1964/trailer/full movie on Internet Archives). But right now, in 2009, a mere four years since this thing went straight to DVD, Raiders of the Damned still stinks. The core concept of Raiders of the Damned is a crossbreed of two popular low-budget genres, the post-apocalyptic and zombie film. During some future war a viral weapon named Agent-9X was used; it killed the body but not the brain, so the world is now populated by thinking, flesh-eating zombies – or at least it is on the other side of a humongous wall. (Although the zombies all seem to be on the other side of the wall and people can obviously walk around above ground without being infected, the few human survivors – mostly military and scientists in white coats – seem to prefer living below ground in bunkers.) Dr. Wells (Elijah Murphy) and his assistant Stephanie (Amanda Scheutzow) fly over the wall in a helicopter to experiment with a new zombie-killing chemical, but when they fly too low they get shot down with a catapult and are captured by the zombies, who are under the command of the zombie Colonel Crow (Thomas Martwick – who is much too young to be a general). Crow avowed aim is that he wants Wells’ help in finding an agent to stop the gradual decay of the living dead bodies, but truth be told, he really simply wants to pork Stephanie (who ends up spending most of the rest of the film in a wedding dress). Back in the bunker, whacked-out Dr. Lewis (Richard "Yes, I can sink even lower than Webs (2003)" Grieco) sends out a rescue team consisting of squad leader Crenshaw (Gary Sirchia), Gena Kane (Laura Zoe Quist), Trejo (Laurie Clemens) and Flex (J.C. Austin). Using some sort of anti-matter distortion device (!), they pass through the wall and go search and destroy. Despite supposedly being professional soldiers, they can’t even seem to be able to tie a knot, which results in Flex having to carry Trejo around until the film has been padded enough for her to be able to walk normally again (as for Flex, although he is strong enough to carry her around, most of the time thereafter he is continually winded and taking rests – at least he does until he dies). Whatever. The rest of the film, like everything leading up to this point of the non-action, alternates between more nonsense and hogwash and offers no concept of continuity or logic or anything that remotely indicates that a brain or talent was involved in the production, but it is exactly this total lack of any redeeming factors or ability that makes Raiders of the Damned in any way entertaining. It is its total ineptitude that makes it amusing, if only slightly so. There is so much too trash about this "film" that to do so would take longer than to watch the movie itself. Still, give it another couple of years and it could probably be shown as a double feature with any number of Golden Turkey classics… Raiders of the Damned does get a single plus point for having the best use of a spoon scene since the one in Deranged (1974), but aside from that the two films are in no way comparable.
In retrospect, it seems almost unbelievable that Wes Craven needed three years to find a producer for the original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984/trailer). A year before the concept even entered the vocabulary of the general public via the publication in 1985 of Stephan La Berge's study of the subject in his (aptly titled) book Lucid Dreaming, Craven took the basic concept one horrific step further and created the immortal character Freddy Krueger, a dead child molester inhabiting the dreams and killing the children of the adults that had secretly burnt him to death in retribution for his horrendous crimes against nature. As everyone knows, Craven's film was the beginning of a horror franchise rivaled only by those begun by John Carpenter with Halloween (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham with Friday The 13th (1980). And like those two series have already had, Craven's character is due for a revamp soon... But before that happens, let's take a look at the least successful entry in the original franchise: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2: Freddy's Revenge, the second feature-length film of b-film stalwart director Jack Sholder, who went on to lense such faves as The Hidden (1987/trailer) and Arachnid (2001/trailer). Whatever the unknown reason might be — a bad contract, probably — Craven was not part of this film, the second of way too many films as well as a short-lived television series (and, as mentioned before, an upcoming revamping of the franchise). The then relatively inexperienced Jack Shoulder was pulled in to direct instead, despite his rather inauspicious debut three years earlier with Alone in the Dark (1982/trailer), a film whose cheese factor has helped it age well enough. The scriptwriting chores of Freddy's Revenge were handed over to the likewise inexperienced David Chaskin. The end result: an early entry of the franchise that is generally considered the worst in the series — and in many ways, it is. In the end, the failure of the film didn't really hurt Shoulder's career as an exploitation and straight-to-DVD director, but Chaskin disappeared from the industry despite his later "better" film scripts for the entertainingly artsy Tibor Takics film I, Madman (1989/trailer) and the equally entertainingly but hilariously trashy The Curse (1987/trailer). Although made a mere year after Craven's classic slasher, the events in Freddy's Revenge unfold five years after the demise of Langenkamp, Depp, et all. The Walsh family has moved into the house on Elm Street, and the teenage son Jesse (badly acted by Mark Patton), wearing much too much eyeliner and spending a noticeably extreme amount of time in ugly underwear, is suffering from nasty nightmares. Mommy Webber (Hope Lange, who dealt with a much friendlier supernatural entity in the old television show The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) is at a loss about what to do, while the incompetent Daddy Webber (Clu Gulager) is simply convinced that his son is a drug-taking delinquent. Along the way, aside from an uncontrollable heating system that keeps them sweating, the family suffers such terrifying events as a spontaneously combusting toaster and rabid, exploding love-birds. It seems that Freddy (Robert Englund, of course) is out to possess Jesse's body so that he can crossover into the real world and kill anyone and everyone. As Freddy says to Jesse in one of the film's few truly scary scenes, "You've got the body, I've got the brains." Eventually, Jesse/Freddy slices up the school's decidedly S&M oriented gym teacher (Marshall Bell) during a steaming gym shower scene and, after trying to broaden Jesse's concept of cunnilingus, Freddy eventually cubes Jesse's washboard-bellied buddy Ron Grady (Robert Rusler) before attempting to boil some dozen teenagers in a swimming pool. Jesse's gal Lisa Webber (Kim Myers, who looks like a young Meryl Streep but lacks the latter's thespian abilities) runs off after her possessed heartthrob and, in the end, love prevails and all is well that ends well — or so it seems until the final expected twist ending. A lot has been made in the past about the supposed homosexual undercurrent of Freddy's Revenge, and though the filmmakers have supposedly gone on record as saying it wasn't on purpose, one tends to think that they are lying. Not only is there a remarkable dearth of jiggling babes for a teen-oriented horror film of the time, but the undercurrents are obvious everywhere. From the Coach's obvious sexual predilection to the constant scenes of young men in underwear and manly buns to the unidentified small carton seen briefly in Jesse's closet with the word PROBE printed on it, much in this film exhibits a preference for the backdoor rather than the front. Likewise, it is easy to interpret Jesse's slow possession as symbolizing the gradual realization of his own sexuality, and his flight from his horrific first sexual encounter with Lisa as a personification of the horror many a young homosexual feels when they first try to fit in the sexual boundaries of heterosexual middle-class America. Moreover, when Jesse flees from Lisa, he goes straight to his good looking (and boxer-clad) pal Ron, asking if he can spend the night there. Regrettably, any interpretation of Freddy's Revenge in this regards reveals a rather homophobic stance on part of the filmmakers, be they themselves gay or not. Jesse's sexuality is a killer monster out to destroy everything and everyone, almost a 3-D personification of AIDS as a walking and talking but deadly creature — hardly a positive presentation of alternative sexualities. (No wonder the filmmakers deny any homosexual subtext.) Actually, undercurrents and interpretations aside, to simply say that Freddy's Revenge is a bad film is taking the easy way out. Much like Halloween Three: Season of the Witch (1983/trailer), the film isn't really as thoroughly gawd-awful as it is out of place. Had either films been made separately from the respective series they were tied to and without the name association, they might have been enjoyable for their own merits. As it is, stuck solidly amongst the other films and, at least in the case of Freddy's Revenge, utilizing some of the same characters, the films stick out like leprous thumbs and bomb accordingly. Still, there are some good scares to be found in Freddy's Revenge. The one in which Jesse awakes tucking-in his little sister only to discover that he is wearing Freddy's glove is a shock, and the scene in which Freddy pops out of Jesse's stomach is, well, nicely gut wrenching. Likewise, everyone has to cringe when the monster tongue pops out of Jesse's mouth while he's slowly kissing his way down Lisa's stomach towards her love box. And, of course, the bus ride which opens the film is hilariously enjoyable, even if it doesn't scare much. Unluckily, most of what happens in between is rather uninteresting or badly dated — the hilarious dated bar scene (it screams "This is the 80s!!!") being the best (worst?) example, the pool party being the worst (best?). Still, if you are one of the few, the odd, the queer who haven't yet seen a Nightmare film, there are many better ones in the series, the first one still remaining the best. For the best on-line presentation on the sexuality of this flick (which I discovered long after I wrote this review, and from whence the photo to the left was borrowed), see the entry at Freddy In Space. OK, the article does reek slightly of unacknowledged homophobia, but face it, most heterosexual men have an illogical fear of gaydom that brings out this attitude. Well, my brethren breeders, just so you know: banana might not be as much fun as tuna with a side of melons, but it is better than an empty plate.
