Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (Japan, 1995)

(Spoilers.) Another obscure movie (for Westerners) found in our DVD pile of "unknown movies", a mound of Sisyphean proportions accrued over the years that never seems to shrink no matter how many times we blindly pull out a DVD to watch. 

Trailer:

Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, like the name of the director, Shimako Satō, was totally unknown to us. And after having seen the movie and having researched the flick's background a bit, we just couldn't help but think of that highly (if sadly) entertaining Tumblr blog, Shit People Say to Women Directors, 'cause, like, women directors are a rare thing... and what do you know, but "Shimako" seems to be a women's name in Japan and the flick was made by one of the "weaker sex". Not that anything about the film would've indicated the sex of the director — which is why we thought of the previously mentioned blog. And as our meandering mind tends to wander, thinking of the above Tumblr made us think in turn of that disgusting paean to intellectual retardation, the Tumblr Women Against Feminism. What does all that have to do with Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness? Hello! Turn on that light bulb in your head and connect the dots yourself for a change.

But till then, let's get back to Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, the first of a franchise totaling with six movies that also includes Eko Eko Azarak II: Birth of the Wizard (1996 / trailer), Eko Eko Azarak III: Misa The Dark Angel (1998 / trailer), Eko Eko Azarak IV: Awakening (2001), and Eko Eko Azarak: R-page (2006) and Eko Eko Azarak: B-page (2006 / trailer to both), as well as a TV series. (The last two movies could well be edited versions of the Japanese television series, going by the look of the trailers.) It would seem that Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, and its lead character, are obscure only outside of the Land of the Rising Sun; there, the franchise has its roots in a super-popular manga originally serialized in the teen magazine Weekly Shonen Champion from 1974 to 1979 and is far from unknown. How true the film is to the original we do not know, so that aspect is immaterial to our view of Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness.

At its core, Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness is basically a teen bodycounter (with a bodycount of around 15), the minor difference is that the final girl and heroine of the flick, Misa Kuroi (Kimika Yoshino) is a witch. She transfers to a school which, we learn, is the location where Lucifer is to be summoned by a group of unknown Satanists and, rather ineffectually, she tries to stop both the event and save the lives of a variety of her classmates doomed to die as their deaths are a key to the summoning. Kept after school one evening to retake a maths exam, much like in the absolutely dreadful Danish bodycounter Final Hour, also from 1995, the students are suddenly unable to leave the building and start dropping like flies. Unlike Final Hour, however, as cheesy as Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness is, it is also relatively well made, highly atmospheric, occasionally even scary, is populated by at least some characters that gain viewer sympathy and, at least until the final scene, remains both an interesting and effective movie. It's a shame about the last ten minutes, though.

Personally, we were rather happy to finally see an Asian horror flick that didn't fixate on ghosts with long hair and not only included some nice gore (as well as some cheesy computer-generated stuff) but also had a couple of totally gratuitous and exploitive lesbian scenes. (Less happily, in this regard, is that lesbianism is presented as either a reflection of a person's corruption or, if you are not corrupt, then as an act that requires punishment. Also in this regard, the old chestnut about "if you have sex you die" is less applicable, because many [probable] virgins die in the movie.) The first death of the flick, of an unknown women fleeing in terror through the streets of an unnamed town who meets her death by way of steel girder, is a highlight and is really never again equaled throughout the entire movie, though the lesbian student nailed to the table and the death by overflowing toilet are almost as memorable, each in their own way.

We would be hard-pressed, however, to call this the movie "Japan's response to Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (as is done on the DVD cover) because, well, not only was Buffy consistently campy, but Buffy was also usually effective at what she was doing. Unlike in Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness, which is far more cheesy than campy, and in which Misa is not at all effective: she not only fails to save anyone, but is herself killed and Lucifer is also summoned — upon which the movie suddenly becomes an unsatisfying headscratcher as, going by the fate of the summoner (and confirmed by Misa's inability to save anyone), there was no reason for the good witch to even bother showing up at the school in the first place. And how the fuck does she manage to suddenly return from the dead?

In the end, we would say that Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness is more about the journey than the destination. Shot on a low budget in two weeks, it is better directed and made than many flicks of its ilk and this, combined with a relatively low-fat story and linear narrative, makes it an enjoyable B-film experience up until the final ten minutes, after which the movie falls totally apart and deflates like a pin-pricked blow-up sex doll.

On the whole, when compared to the last dead teenage film we saw featuring kids trapped in a school — the previously mentioned example of dripping santorum, Final Hour — Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness is a frigging masterpiece. But taken on its own, it is ultimately a disappointment, and is thus recommended only with reservation. (Nevertheless, we do plan to someday watch another Eko Eko DVD, Eko Eko Azarak III: The Awakening [2001], which currently still languishes in our Sisyphean pile of DVDs.)

Short Film: Don't Hug Me I'm Scared (2011)

Sesame Street from Hell. This is the first of a series of short created by Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling. It and the others in the series seem to have been rather popular on-line — regular memes, so to say — but like normal we missed the fuss and only recently stumbled upon this and their other fabulous shorts.

To simply steal from Wikipedia: "Each episode is made to appear like a typical children's television program, consisting of singing and talking puppets similar to those of Sesame Street, but eventually takes a dark turn, usually involving gore. The videos parody children's television shows by ironically juxtaposing puppetry and musical numbers against psychedelic content and disturbing imagery."

Dunno how many episodes have been made to date, but this is the first one made and the first one we ever saw, so we want to share it with you.

Now let's all agree to never be creative again.

City of Rott (Pennsylvania, 2006)

If one is to believe the imdb, this relatively plotless animated zombie gore flick was made on an estimated budget of $5,550, to which we can only conjecture that the cash was split between the computer program used for the animation and a lot of coffee, 'cause it sure doesn't look like it was spent on much else. And, indeed, a look at the cast and credits of City of Rott reveals some dude named Frank Sudol as the writer and director and producer and editor and composer and all voices — truly a one-man effort. As such, for the first time in our life we finally understood what all those dumb-ass teachers meant when they would say "Well, I'll give you an A for effort, but...."

City of Rott is one of those movies that seems to divide its limited audience. We saw it as part of a small group of four, and two liked it and two hated it. We belong to the latter duo, though we tried hard to belong to the former — but the fact of the matter is that at 77 minutes in length, City of Rott is way, way, way, way  tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo long for its slim plot, primitive technique, and hammered-in thematic message. We weren't just relieved when the flick ended, we were downright happy.

In the filmic world of Sudol's City of Rott, mankind has fallen victim to worms from outer space that invade our bodies and change us into unthinking undead with an unquenchable appetite for innards and flesh. But as is made obvious by the posters and banners and billboards and other advertisements seen in the background throughout the movie, City of Rott is, somewhere at its core, a criticism of conformism and the one-of-the-herd mentality of modern man in contemporary society wrapped in a slim storyline about and anchored by the elderly man Fred Figiero and his walker. Fred, one of the few remaining living people in the city of Rott, is in search of a new pair of loafers, and as he wanders through the city in search of new shoes he crosses paths with a limited amount of other survivors — none who survive all that long — and hordes of hungry zombies, most of which he bloodily obliterates with his talkative walker.

Fred is very much a nutcase, and he holds lively discussions and arguments at various times with his walker, one of his shoes, and himself, but for the most part he is also an effective zombie killer lost in a world with no future: it is basically simply a matter of time before he, like everyone else, either falls victim to the zombies or the worms — and conforms. (Sudol takes his criticism of mankind's lack of individuality a step further by adding the aspect that in the end, even the individual is part of the masses: Fred's craziness — or his individuality — is caused by a second kind of parasitic alien worm, one that simply makes you crazy, so in the end he is basically one of the masses as well. It would seem the Sudol views true individuality as impossible — a point of view we wouldn't argue against.)

But the "intellectual" theme aside, City of Rott is a flawed movie. It's animation style, though a far cry from the cut-paper simplicity of, say, South Park — a series (1997-present) and film (1999 / trailer) that City of Rott easily calls to mind — is executed with far less aplomb or skill than even the earliest episodes of that never-ending series. Sudol's primitivist style is indeed obviously intentionally "artless", and is also perhaps the best thing about the movie, but nevertheless the animation technique often slides too far into simply being badly executed: figures flicker or walk backwards, the backgrounds sometimes go out of focus for a few seconds, occasional objects float out of place across the screen (the latter might be intentional, on occasion). A little more polish wouldn't have hurt.

Likewise, the movie is simply too long for its slim story. Sudol pads the movie with excessive and not particularly funny dialogue and never-ending scenes of carnage, and both eventually become predictable and boring. Particularly the long scenes of Fred killing zombies become yawners, despite all the animated gore: more than once the viewer feels like a fifth wheel on a car, like a person watching over the shoulder of a gamer playing a one-person game in which the gamer has the fun of destroying thousands of zombies while the viewer has nothing to do but watch and twiddle their thumbs. Boring!

Lastly, the other characters and overall narrative of City of Rott are pretty much all over the place and never really connect. In regards to the secondary and tertiary human survivors, the result is that with the possible exception of the underused sexy nurse, none truly seem integrated into the story and most come across as added padding — as does the entire final act of the movie after Fred wanders out to a farm. City of Rott would have been better-served with either a better scriptwriter or as a short film.

Oh, yeah: while the music doesn't exactly suck donkey dick, it does now and then at least lick baby donkey dick.

So, final verdict: were it not the only animated feature-length zombie we know of, we would simply dismiss it as hardly imperative viewing. As it is, City of Rott is probably of above normal interest for zombie-film completionists — and thus, in the end, as flawed as it is, we give it an A for effort....

Trailers of Promise – Films We Haven't Seen: The Giant Claw (1957)

"The Giant Claw is every bit as unrepentantly bizarre as any Japanese or Korean creature film, and in exactly the same characteristic way. It is, so far as I’ve seen, the only true American kaiju."
1000 Misspent Hours

AKA The Mark of the Claw. A classic "bad film" high on our list of films to see — and as it easy to get online, we plan to see it soon. Director Fred F. Frears's short career — he died at the age of 44 (7 July 1913-30 November 1957) — was spent entirely at Columbia, where he was a regular collaborator with the legendary producer Sam Katzman (7 July 1901-4 August 1973), the man behind many a trash classic and not-so-classic, as well as one or two real classics, such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956 / trailer), which Frears also directed and featured special effects by the great Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen was originally intended to do the effects for The Great Claw, also, but was replaced by some cheap model makers in Mexico City who supplied the legendary marionette that makes the movie what it is.

The story of The Giant Claw (1957), written by Samuel Newman (Invisible Invaders [1959 / trailer]) and Paul Gangelin (The Mad Ghoul [1943 / full movie] and The Boogie Man Will Get You [1942 / full movie]), is as follows: "Engineer Mitch McAfee (Jeff Morrow) is conducting a test flight of radar equipment for the Air Force in Alaska when he reports that his plane has been passed by something as big as a flying battleship. This is disbelieved back at base but he persists with his claim. Soon after, he is proven right as air traffic is attacked amid further reports of a giant flying bird. The Air Force attempts to shoot the bird down but it proves impervious to any type of attack. Scientists then realise that it is an alien creature made of antimatter, which is causing it to be invisible to radar and capable of projecting a shield to protect itself from any attack." (From: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review)

 

The Great Mara Corday

The babe of the film, "Sally Caldwell", is played by the exotically beautiful cult actress Mara Corday (born Marilyn Joan Watts on 3 January 1930), the Playmate of the October 1958 issue of Playboy (34-24-35, D cup) and an extremely popular cheesecake model of her day. Her most famous movie is undoubtedly 1955's Tarantula (trailer), and she can also be found in the not quite as entertaining "bad movie" The Black Scorpion (1957 / trailer).

  Watch, gape at, and enjoy the trailer to
The Giant Claw: