October 2009: How Pregnancy Happens - The Fun Way

Time for a real educational video. What the hell, they’re film, too. I really can't recall any of the Sex Ed films that I ever saw in school as being as funny as this one, but then, who knows if this one ever got shown in a public school. This little animated gem was made for Planned Parenthood by flickerlab, a politically correct communications firm with a fun sense of humour that have done all sorts of groovy and entertaining shorts and stuff for firms like the American Heart Association (The Bad Fat Brothers) and Proctor & Gamble or shows like the Colbert Report. Among the four managing partners and creative directors of flickerlab is Harold Moss, who did the fabulous short A Brief History of the USA for Bowling for Columbine (2003/trailer).

Meatball Machine (Japan, 2005)

Another great film from the home country of Issei Sagawa... that be Japan, for those of you who don't know who he is.
The not-yet-infamous Fundoshi Corps is a Japanese exploitation firm specializing in cheap Japanese school girl soft-core (?), horror anthologies, and a whole slew of machine-based horror. Among the fun stuff they have regurgitated is Robo-Geisha (2009 / trailer), Unholy Woman (2006 / trailer), The Machine Girl (2008 / trailer) and this baby, an interesting little film called Meatball Machine. The 2005 feature-length version of Meatball Machine, supposedly directed in tandem by Yûdai Yamaguchi (the man behind Battlefield Baseball [2003 / trailer]) and Jun'ichi Yamamoto, is a low budget remake of an even lower budget short film by Jun'ichi Yamamoto alone from 1999 also entitled Meatball Machine. Some DVDs out there are said to include both films; regrettably the one watched for this review did not. So who knows to what extent this newer, longer version is different, but considering how fucking great the 2005 version is, it is hard to believe that the short one can be any better. (Sometimes, size does matter.)
This time around, oddly enough, the script is credited to Junya Kato alone, who also scribed the genre-mix Death Trance (2005/ trailer). The film tells the tale of a young milquetoast factory worker named Joji (Issei Takahashi), a wimpy virgin, who secretly yearns for the young Sachiko (Aoba Kawai), a woman he often watches hang wash on the other side of the canal during his lunch break. Unknown to them – and the rest of Japan, obviously enough – parasites that look oddly reminiscent of an horseshoe crab are on the loose in the neighborhood, turning their hosts into ugly mutants called "Neoborgs". (Where the name comes from is obvious enough, especially midway through the film when one character flatly states "Resistance is futile".) The Neoborgs are killing machines that do nothing but kill anyone that crosses their path. But much like in The Highlander (1986 / trailer), they prefer to kill their own kind; only, instead of absorbing energy of the defeated dead in a cheap light show, the winning Neoborg bloodily rip the controlling parasite out of the neck of the dead Neoborg and eats it for lunch. (We get to see one such battle before the credits even roll, when a parasite converts a would-be suicide and, shortly thereafter, first splits open the head of another Neoborg and then dines in a shower of red blood.)
After a failed attempt at losing his cherry with a prostitute, Joji ends up saving Sachiko from being raped by his boss. Later, as the two would-be lovebirds begin to get to know each other back at Joji's flat, Sachiko gets attacked and converted by a parasite in a scene that brings to mind the wonderfully tasteless death of Dr. Barbara Glaser (June Chadwick) in that sleaze sci-fi classic Forbidden World (1982 / trailer). (One wonders when the first horror film will come out using the same concept but with men and the rear door.) Soon thereafter, Joji is likewise infected, but he manages to prevent full transformation and sets out to save Sachiko. But all Sachiko wants is lunch…
Meatball Machine is very much a descendent of Shinya Tsukamoto’s industrial art-splatter B&W films Testuo: Iron Man (1989 / trailer) and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992 / trailer), but in full colour, less artistic pretensions and a lot more blood, guts and latex. It is a film that easily leads to you to cocking your eye in amazement as you wonder just what the fuck did you put in the DVD player. In other words, Meatball Machine is some pretty fine gonzo trash from Japan.… No CGI, good old cheap and sleazy low budget blood and guts with inferred sex and cannibalism.
The film ends with a nihilistic twist that doesn’t really hold water but is good for a laugh. Meatball Machine is not an art film – it is far more Accion Mutante (1993) than Eraserhead (1977 / trailer) – but for fans of glibbery gross-out violence and immature humour, it is an industrial blood bath well worth visiting.

The Mummy (USA, 1999)

A supposed remake of the original which has little to do with any of the previous mummy films, be it the 1936 production with Boris Karloff (trailer), the tacky Hammer production with Christopher Lee (trailer) or any of the numerous sequels of both earlier versions. Other than the facts that one character goes by the name Ardeth Bay – Karloff's "human" name in the original version of The Mummy – and that the High Priest Imhotep gets his tongue cut out before being buried alive, there are few similarities between John L. Balderston's original screenplay of the Karl Freud Universal film and the special effects extravaganza Stephan Sommers serves up. The Mummy, in this case, is more closely related to James Cameron's Titanic (1997 / trailer) than the cheesy Hammer production or the artful original. For fans of state-of-the-art special effects (ala 1999) the film is a must, but anyone looking for depth, involvement, characterization, tension, suspense or anything else that might make the film enjoyable shouldn't bother.
Not to say that it is an unwatchable film. The Mummy is simply a by-the-number Hollywood product for the unthinking, uncaring masses. It is as sterile as it is predictable, as perfectly made as it is unsatisfying. More hokey and dumb than camp and enjoyable, the movie features too much second-rate Indiana Jones and not enough of a logical story or even of a mummy. Much too long, the film never excites or involves, though the effects sure do razzle and dazzle. That all the effects are computer generated is not the problem; the problem is that the film itself feels as if it were made by a computer. Sommers' direction is competent enough, but he is no master when it comes to intelligent scriptwriting, and is definitely better suited to doing more unabashedly trashy work, like his script to Gunmen (1994 / trailer) or his entertaining and almost equally computer generated (but miles better) monster flick Deep Rising (1998 / trailer). The script to this mummy movie is definitely much too flawed to warrant it's seeming A-production, though the money it has brought in at box office does little to support this thesis... but then, the taste of the masses has never been understandable, as is easily proven by such things as varied as Sly Stallone movies, Bush’s two terms as president, Sex and the City and the death penalty. Perhaps if Brendan Fraser (as Rick O'Connell) had taken his shirt off and shown more of the excellent physic he paraded in George of the Jungle (1997 / trailer) the film might have been a bit more interesting, but regrettably he, like Rachel Weisz, stays clothed throughout the whole film.
The biggest flaw to the story is the very idea behind the mummy's power. In ancient Egypt, when Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) and Princess Anck Su Samun (Patricia Velazquez) kill the pharaoh, Imhotep is punished by being buried alive with a curse that converts him into a godlike creature should he ever be awakened. (Excuse me? He basically gets converted from being a mere mortal into being an evil god as a punishment? Is there something I don't understand here?) Of course, the Egyptians then form a secret society that guards the grave for centuries, killing all who try to open the tomb but who don't really bother all that hard to stop the newest group of infidels from doing so. Most escape, so the big bad magic man follows them to town and reclaims the various urns stolen that contain the innards needed to revive his love, killing the predictable victims and visiting various biblical plagues onto the masses along the way. Though he can be stopped only by cats, the heroes don't even bother to take a single kitty with them when they go to save the kidnapped Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz). (Despite the fact that he didn't require a human sacrifice during his first attempt to revive his babe centuries ago, the all powerful godlike creature suddenly needs one in the 20th century. Not only that, but it just has to be Evelyn.) There is a brief interlude in which everyone gets transported into the movie Jason & the Argonauts (1963 / trailer) which is rather enjoyable, but it seems to me that for such a powerful creature the mummy fights rather sloppily.
Of course, all is well that ends well and our three surviving heroes ride off into the sunset, a fourth hero that by all accounts should be dead suddenly popping up to wish them well. As to be expected, The Mummy went on to spawn (to date) two unnecessary but widely popular sequels, The Mummy Returns (2001 / trailer) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008 / trailer), the last of which is the best of the three.

Låt den rätte komma in / Let the Right One In (Sweden, 2008)

OK, the truth is out: Ingmar Bergman is alive and undead and still in Sweden where he now makes low-budget vampire films.
Naw, not really, but Tomas Alfredson, the director of Låt den rätte komma in / Let the Right One In, sure seems to have a gloomy streak comparable to the late great art house master, for his film version of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel – Lindqvist also wrote the screenplay – is as morose and grim as any of Bergman's B&W contemplations on daily misery. Really, going by the Swedish films I’ve seen to date – including this one – the question that comes to my mind is not why some Swedes commit suicide, but why they don't all do so.
Let the Right One In is in all intents and purposes a vampire film, but what a unique one it is. No sexy vampires here, no superhuman undead killing machines, no hot babes with heaving bodices, no philosophical contemplations on the nature of man and beast, death and killing. No, instead, amidst the icy, cold, depressing and alienating suburban landscape of Blackeberg, Sweden, a location populated by middle-aged alcoholics, sadistic kids, and uninterested parents and teachers, a grim and death-filled tale unfolds of two lonely "kids" that first develop a friendship with and then a consensual need for each other.
Twelve-year-old Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), who lives with his divorced mom in a bleak suburban circa 1982, is terrorized at school by a trio of future juvenile delinquents. One night as he takes his frustrations out by stabbing a tree – "Squeal like a pig. So, Squeal." – he is suddenly confronted by his new neighbor, a dark-haired and underdressed girl named Eli (Lina Leandersson) who smells as if she has less than good grooming habits. She can stand no sun or food, and more than once maintains that she is not a girl, but slowly a deep friendship develops between the two – a friendship deep enough that Oskar can deal with the eventual realization that Eli is a vampire as easily as one might accept the fact that someone is left-handed or dyslexic.
Eli lives with Håkan (Per Ragnar), a man who could be her father, her lover, her Renfield or any combination thereof, who goes out at night killing people and draining them of their blood to feed his charge. (In truth, however, both times he goes out hunting in the film he is so incredible incompetent one can only wonder how he ever managed to keep Eli regularly fed.) His untimely end forces Eli to go hunting on her own, which results in the tragedy of Virginia (Ika Nord), who meets an end similar to that met by Emmanuel (Don Rickles) in Innocent Blood (1992 / trailer) but not played for laughs. Eli helps Oskar learn to defend himself, but instead of ending the torture it sets a series of events into motion that could easily mean his death... but what are friends for if not to help each other in times of need?
Let the Right One In is probably one of the most unspectacular vampire films ever made, and therein lies much of it strength. The story develops slowly and grimly, with but occasional unspectacular flashes of violence or blood, but the very lack of spectacle makes the horror of the events all the more uncomfortable. Eli may be undead, but most of those who are alive seem to be emotionally dead or crippled, and the harm that they do onto each other – emotionally and physical – can hardly be called living or humane. But even as the friendship blossoms between Eli and Oskar, as they learn that they both need and want each other's friendship, the viewer is left with an uncomfortable and queasy feeling that what to come after the film has ended can hardly be better than the horrors just witnessed.
As is the case with so many "foreign" films, Let the Right One In has entered remake hell: director Matt Reeves, the man who directed Cloverfield (2008 / trailer), will be releasing his Americanized version in 2010. Somehow it seems doubtful he'll manage a film half as disquieting as the original.